MySQL Enables Litigation Solutions to Grow as a Company

Litigation Solutions, Inc. (LSI) specializes in worker's compensation fraud investigation and detection. The company provides a range of services, including video and covert camera surveillance, activity and background checks, electronic record requests, and record retrieval and delivery to major insurance carriers and law offices in the mid-Atlantic region. Data is vital to LSI's efforts and to its growth. Since its inception almost five years ago, the company has expanded into new geographic and service areas, generating ever more data for its customers. MySQL®, the world's most popular open source database, provides the mission-critical database applications that keep LSI in business and help it grow.

"To have enterprise-caliber database performance from an open source product governed by the GPL license is quite valuable," says Stephen Junker, vice president of technology for LSI. "It provides a small, growing company with access to high quality infrastructure software, laying the foundation for future growth. The ease of use and deployment has also allowed a one-person IT staff to deploy, manage, and maintain databases for several critical applications."

In fact, Junker's database approach is based on the open source LAMP model, with slight variations. In addition to MySQL, Litigation Solutions uses PHP for scripting. However, due to an inherited Windows environment, iMatix's Xitami serves Web pages in place of Apache.

The company has three primary databases for workflow management applications. The primary database facilitates the retrieval of medical, employment, scholastic, and various other types of records, while another database manages the workflow for surveillance and investigations. A third application handles document production in an insurance records department. All of this data is tied together with LSI Customer Link, a web portal that enables customers to make and track work requests and powered by data from the other databases.

The record retrieval database originally ran on Microsoft Access, which, according to Junker, couldn't keep up as the data volume increased. Before moving to MySQL, he considered Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

"The enterprise speed, features, training and GPL license were more than enough incentive to move to MySQL, and we haven't been disappointed," says Junker.

MySQL 4.0 easily manages a total of 659 MB of data. The largest table contains 1.5MM records. The systems run on Intel x86 hardware platforms running both Windows NT and Red Hat Linux.

Junker says that he also gained unexpected benefits, such as ease of use and portability. The file-based data structure enables him to move tables and databases effortlessly the development and production environments.

"I can have a complete copy of all of our production data on the laptop that I use for development. I have no fear of changes being made in the development environment not being successfully deployed, because the environments are identical," says Junker. "I don't need extra licenses or an impractical amount of disk space to achieve that. Tools such as MySql Control Center and webyog's SQLyog allow me to build the databases, manage the data, and to do ad hoc reporting.

"MySQL will be the foundation of every data-driven application we deploy," says Junker. "Possibilities for future applications include a virtual document repository for storing and displaying retrieved documents."