Pason Systems Strikes Oil

Pason Systems Inc. is an industrial technology company based in Calgary Canada. It provides the design, manufacturing and rental of specialized drilling instrumentation systems for use on about 1,000 land-based commercial oil-drilling rigs in Canada and the U.S. Pason's products and services include data acquisition, well site reporting software, remote communications and Internet information management tools.

Pason selected MySQL for a database application called the DataHub, originally developed in 1999. Pason’s DataHub is a data repository for drilling data, well information, tour sheets and morning reports for Canada’s 12,000 oil wells. Transmission can be via landline, cellular or satellite, and customers control who has access to the data. DataHub’s Canadian activity follows the seasons, actively peaking in the winter months with about 3,000 users.

DataHub is a 210 Gigabyte application running on Dell servers and the Linux operating system. Pason uses a commercial license of MySQL because their technology is proprietary.

In the development phase, Pason considered using Oracle to build the DataHub application but selected MySQL because “we looked at the Ziff-Davis database benchmark report and liked MySQL’s performance,” said Wing Gee, project manager. “We also knew we didn’t need the advanced features found in Oracle.”

Gee says Pason selected MySQL because of its performance, reliability and ease of use. “It is the easiest database to configure and it is inexpensive to run,” reports Gee. “The cost benefit was a strong incentive as it is significantly cheaper than Oracle and it allows us to control our own R&D.”

One unexpected benefit of using MySQL was MySQL’s support. In an effort to assure excellent performance, Pason purchased MySQL’s premium support service. “We got such good support,” says Gee. “MySQL support staff helped us tune our servers so they were optimized for our use and no matter what the communication – by phone, email or remote connection – the support was excellent. If we emailed a problem to the support people at MySQL, we’d hear back minutes later about our problem.”

Pason’s future plans for MySQL include the development of an internal knowledge base to collect error reports, software bugs and additional oil drilling data. The application will act as a help desk to people in the oil and gas business who need to search for past solutions to current problems. Another planned MySQL application is Pason’s WebPay, a software program to collect financial information on all oil drilling activity for a well. Pason hopes to roll out both internal and commercial versions of WebPay.

Contact Info:
Wing Gee, Project Manager
Pason Systems, Inc.