A New Job, (almost) the Same Environment, and a New Perspective

I'm now at a different employer. Yes, it's still the health field, but it's a well known health plan rather than a pediatric hospital. It's still an Epic shop and Clarity is used, but the source is Teradata. SQL Server is used as the mart data store and query engine.

Unlike the former shop, I now work in the business and analytics section rather than IT. Both the former and latter have difficulties with Epic's over-normalization of the 7000 Clarity tables and all that implies - although the size of the data in the new environment is far larger than the former. In response, the new employer started a couple of years ago to identify demensional models of the core business. Extracts were in turn developed to feed Clarity data into star structures in MSSQL. All of this was farmed out to a third party server hosting firm. The result: We focus on the business need (trends in membership, payments, etc.) rather than the SQL maintenance and other back room tasks.

Performance in the data warehouse is terrific. Stay tuned on other observations as I pursue this leg of my career.