Alameda County Water District

Yanyang Xu came to Claresco with a translation problem. Xu, a senior chemist at the Alameda County (CA) Water District, discovered that an equipment upgrade for crucial instrumentation had led to a communication failure between new instrumentation and the old software used to track the testing data generated by that instrumentation. At the same time, Xu's laboratory was upgrading its databases to a new version of Oracle and was having trouble importing their existing data into the new database - a process known as database migration The fixes would be important ones. The ACWD provides drinking water to residents of three Bay Area cities, and must certify that the water meets both federal and state safety standards by sending in regular reports to the state's Department of Health Services. The instruments used, including gas chromatographs, flow injection and atomic absorption equipment, test samples from all of the ACWD's water treatment plants, as well as distribution systems and even private homes that receive the water. A glitch in the system would be costly. Not only would the ACWD have to publicly report a problem with the water supply in the media, but undetected high levels of pollutants, metals, or other substances could lead to health problems for those who drink the water. "That's the worst thing that could happen to the water district," says Xu. Claresco was called in to assist the ACWD in preparing their new instrumentation to work with the existing software, and to perform the Oracle database migration. With over a decade of experience working with Oracle, Claresco database administrators were able to complete the migration within two weeks. The data translation, on the other hand, was a more complicated challenge. The laboratory depends on Thermo Electron Corporation's SampleManager, a LIMS (laboratory information management system) program, and Yukon, a client-server program that sends instrumentation data to the LIMS, to track data from its water-testing experiments. But the software depended on a specific type of data formatting that the new instrumentation couldn't provide. "We spent a solid few months working with the existing LIMS software and trying to make it work with the new instrumentation," says Brett D'Ambrosio, CEO of Claresco. "But even the best solutions were not robust enough for a production laboratory environment. Finally we decided the best solution would be to write custom software to translate the data into a readable format for the existing software program that would be usable with other platforms in the event Yukon ever became obsolete." The resulting software, dubbed "Yukon Helper" because it was designed to work alongside the Yukon client-server program, translates data from the lab instruments to XML (extensible markup language) format. This makes it both easily readable to the Yukon program, and also usable for Web-based applications. There were additional challenges. Not all of the lab's computers had network access because of connectivity constraints among different machines in the lab. Claresco set up a direct serial connection between the lab's instrumentation and the computers used to run the Yukon software to solve the problem of network connectivity. Claresco's relationship with the Alameda County Water District will continue in the future. Claresco has been signed to make additional improvements to the way data is managed and translated into a format suitable for reporting to the state. Among the improvements will be a facility to automatically flag test results that are deemed unreliable, and a warning system to alert lab personnel when unnaturally high levels of contaminants are detected in water samples.