INTERCONNECTS

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has taken first place in workload, OLTP systems, in Winter Corporation's worldwide scalability competition with a system built on CA's Advantage CA-Datacom. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection system processes more than two billion online and batch database requests daily against more than four terabytes of data. With peak activity of more than 51,000 transactions per second, the system was found to be more than 13 times faster than the second-place finisher. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is an agency of the Department of Homeland Security and is charged with preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States. In addition to processing border- crossing information for tens of thousands of people each day, U.S. Customs and Border Protection processes more than 100,000 daily batch jobs representing billions of dollars of trade shipments entering and leaving the United States. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is also responsible for apprehending individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally; stemming the flow of illegal drugs and other contraband; protecting U.S. agricultural and economic interests from harmful pests and diseases; protecting businesses from theft of their intellectual property; and regulating and facilitating international trade, collecting import duties, and enforcing U.S. trade laws. U.S. Customs and Border Protection became an official agency of the Department of Homeland Security on March 1, 2003, combining employees from the Department of Agriculture, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol and the U.S. Customs Service. "Our mandate is extremely challenging from a technological perspective and extremely critical from a national security perspective," said Linda Jacksta, director, systems engineering, U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "As Winter Corporation's assessment has shown, the system we have built with the help of CA's technology and expertise delivers the world-class performance and scalability we need to fulfill that mandate." Another Winter Corporation study showed that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection 's OLTP database is one of the world's 10 largest. CA's Advantage CA-Datacom is a powerful, Web-enabled database platform that supports some of the world's largest transaction processing systems. "We are delighted to see one of our customers recognized for this extraordinary feat of database engineering," said Mark Combs, senior vice president at CA. "It's particularly rewarding to know that CA technology is contributing to a system that is playing such an important role in the protection of this country's citizen's from such a wide range of potential threats." The Winter TopTen Program identifies the world's leading database implementations based on database size, most rows/records and highest workload achieved. The program recognizes the database practitioners whose accomplishments are advancing the boundaries of database size and power. Complete results of the Winter Group survey can be found at: http://www.wintercorp.com/vldb/2003_TopTen_Survey/TopTenWinners.asp.