SPARQL is used this way at eli lily. All databases are more or less accessible via SPARQL using e.g. d2r or any other conversion tool. Technical performance is

SPARQL is used this way at eli lily. All databases are more or less accessible via SPARQL using e.g. d2r or any other conversion tool. Technical performance is crap, yet the all important financial performance is fantastic. Basically all the databases that already existed are the fish and federated SPARQL is the water used to connect it all. Main use case is difficult and tedious novel questions that should be answered. Not much is public about it but it is an interesting approach. Will try to write more about what I recall from public talks. What I meant with techincal performance is crap: federated joins between databases inside their infra can be very very slow. e.g. some SPARQL queries of theirs run for a week or so. However, this is not a problem, as any other solution would cost them many more man weeks and billable hours to get the same answer. Datawarehousing is not the answer they already had 70+ datawarehouses and one more was not going to be the solution. They needed a way to have the datawarehouses talk to each other. If I recall the story correctly, they went down this road when one of their unpatented drugs was being tested by a 3rd party company that went bankrupt. Legal determined they needed to get all the Eli IP back in house before the bankruptcy procedure started. The legal team went in burnt many many many billable hours and found 2 compounds that they needed to retrieve. The SPARQL team testing stuff out found 2 more over the weekend, with about 2 hours of development work. Since then they have invested a lot in SPARQL as well as security and caching layers to make SPARQL work as a lingua franca between all their databases.