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Case Study: How UCB cut query latency 30x for drug discovery with SingleStore

UCB Case StudySourced & dated by Case Study Desk
Key facts · TL;DR
Company
UCB
Industry
Biopharmaceuticals
Challenge
A legacy Oracle platform left scientists waiting days or weeks for research data.
Headline result
30x lower query latency for early-stage drug discovery

Key results

30x
Lower query latency
48x
Faster batch data refresh
20 min → 20 sec
Query response time
4 hr → 5 min
Batch refresh time

The challenge

UCB's early-stage drug discovery data platform ran on legacy Oracle technology that struggled to meet performance and scale demands. Scientists waited days or weeks for IT to prepare data for analysis, slowing the discovery process, and projected data growth threatened to make the system unstable.

The solution

UCB deployed SingleStore on Azure to provide ultra-fast ingestion, low-latency queries, and high concurrency, giving up to 800 scientists worldwide self-service access to research data.

Thanks to SingleStore, we can do more and do it faster, which is invaluable to our research.

FV
Frédéric Vanclef
Senior IT Expert, UCB

The results, in context

UCB reports a 30x improvement in query latency and a 48x improvement in batch data refresh operations after moving from Oracle to SingleStore. Query response time dropped from 20 minutes to 20 seconds, and batch refresh time fell from 4 hours to 5 minutes.

Products used

SingleStore SingleStore (on Microsoft Azure)