Greetz welcomes MariaDB
By Retail Technology | Wednesday March 5 2014
Global greetings card provider uses open source database platform to cost-effectively scale business and assure online response times
Greetz, the online personalised greeting card & gift shop, is working with open source database and support provider SkySQL to upgrade a key component of its IT infrastructure.
SkySQL helped Greetz successfully implement MariaDB and migrated millions of customer data items to the enterprise-ready open source database. The provider built a custom system to work alongside the online retailer's existing Linux and Hibernate infrastructure.
Scaling infrastructure for growth
Greetz is the Dutch market leader in personalised greeting cards and gifts with more than 6 million online transactions each year. Given its growing base of more than one million customers, Greetz’s IT infrastructure was under pressure. Concerned by the shortage of internal database administrator (DBA) resources and the increasing complexity of managing its database system, Greetz looked for alternatives to provide greater value for money.
Being an e-commerce company, it is vitally important that customer details and purchasing history must be fully traceable and auditable. The online greeting cards retailer also needed a single point of governance and control across all data strands.
Greetz selected SkySQL to replace its existing Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) clustering technology and configure MariaDB to work alongside Greetz’s existing Linux, Galera, Hibernate and Ansible open source platforms.
Ensuring smooth migration path
Taking into consideration the differences in infrastructure, the migration of applications across to MariaDB required fine-tuning vast amounts of customer data. A dedicated SkySQL consulting team carried out end-to-end testing and performance tuning to ensure other systems were aligned and working with the new MariaDB database.
As part of the migration project, SkySQL helped Greetz also to move its existing business information and disaster recovery (DR) from MySQL to MariaDB. With infrastructure and applications already configured, SkySQL extracted the data from the existing servers and then imported it into MariaDB during downtime to avoid affecting business performance.
Giulio Gaioni, chief operating officer at Greetz, said: “We engaged with SkySQL as we had outgrown our current database solution. SkySQL and its team of experts integrated MariaDB and migrated across our data seamlessly, giving us a new database that is faster and more reliable than any other solution we benchmarked. We can now build for the future and continue to grow at a very competitive TCO [total cost of ownership].”
