Featured Microsoft Customer Case Study
FileControl Partners — founded by TexInvestCo's Ahmad Mian — was selected by Microsoft to be featured as a customer success story for its enterprise deployment of SQL Server 2005.
FileControl Partners, creators of the FileControl Knowledge and Litigation Management System, helped pioneer Web-based knowledge management technology. Fortune 500 corporations rely on the system to store, search, and retrieve litigation documents with controlled access across their organizations.
The system was initially deployed on Microsoft SQL Server 2000, running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. After visiting Microsoft's SQL Server Customer Labs in Redmond, Washington, FileControl migrated its database to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (64-bit).
“It used to take two or three hours for us to re-index our terabyte of data. With SQL Server 2005, the same re-indexing takes less than 10 minutes.”
Ahmad Mian, President and Chief Technology Officer, FileControl Partners
FileControl hosts and manages the entire application from a maximum-security, fully-redundant, carrier-class data center running over an OC-192 backbone, and its operations are Department of Justice compliant. With customers spanning time zones around the world, the system has no planned downtime.
“When we leave work in Texas, our customers in Singapore are just arriving. There is no downtime. Our global customer base is always working, and SQL Server has never let us down.”
Ahmad Mian, President and Chief Technology Officer, FileControl Partners
The performance gains were most dramatic in full-text search — the core function used by attorneys and paralegals searching millions of litigation documents under tight deadlines.
“We have some search functions that took 20 to 25 seconds to complete using SQL Server 2000, which now take less than a second since moving to SQL Server 2005.”
Denis Lui, Technical Director, FileControl Partners
FileControl also upgraded its development environment, moving from Visual Studio 6.0, Visual Basic, and C++ to Visual Studio 2005 Team System, with a transition to the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 underway.
“When we evaluated the Team System, we were especially impressed by how it ties test-use cases and unit testing into the full development cycle. We think that moving to Visual Studio Team System will help us develop our applications more quickly while enabling us to retain our high standards for quality. We are also looking forward to working with the Microsoft .NET Framework, and see special value for us in taking advantage of the ASP.NET component.”
Denis Lui, Technical Director, FileControl Partners
| Database | Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) |
|---|---|
| Total database size | 1 terabyte |
| Largest table | 2 billion rows |
| Number of users | 3,000 |
| Concurrent users | 600 |
| Full text search vs. SQL Server 2000 | 25 times faster |
| Data inserts vs. SQL Server 2000 | 3 times faster |
This case study is provided for informational purposes only, based on a Microsoft Corporation customer solution case study of FileControl Partners published September 2006. It is reproduced here to document the real-world engineering work behind TexInvestCo's Recognition credentials.
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