Technology services provider uses MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud to achieve high availability and added performance for resource-intensive database workloads.
Introduction & Background
The Yusp recommendation engine - developed by Hungarian Gravity Research & Development Zrt - provides a scalable personalization solution for enterprises coming from multiple industries, including retail, e-commerce, communications, and advertising. The engine predicts individual consumer behavior and preferences to offer personalized website content recommendations to customers that boost growth and increase consumer satisfaction.
Business Challenges & Goals
Gravity Research & Development was operating its databases on a fork of MySQL 5.6 Community Edition, in addition to hosting the Yusp recommendation engine on bare metal servers from a third-party cloud provider in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. While those servers delivered adequate performance, the company encountered limitations on how fast it could scale the infrastructure to support its critical database workloads.
Yusp ingests data from multiple social media platforms and websites to provide content recommendations to consumers. This required an elastic database platform that would remove time-consuming and resource-intensive Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes. They also required a single database for both OLTP and OLAP queries.
Gravity needed a comprehensive set of security features that would enable the organization to fully secure its database against external attacks. It should also allow the company to enhance its security strategy, maintain high availability for its demanding database workloads, and ensure business continuity.
Gravity also wanted to move to a fully managed database service, so they could focus on growing their business.
Business Results & Metrics
Gravity migrated its database to MySQL Heatwave Database Service running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), consolidating resource-intensive workloads on a single database platform.
With OCI, Gravity removed costly and resource-extensive hardware maintenance while achieving faster time to market. The agility gained from Oracle Cloud's on-demand scalability enabled the company to easily provision virtual machines with sufficient computing capacity to support its demanding database workloads, even during peak usage times. This has also removed a burden from the company's IT specialists who can now focus on helping increase operational excellence.
Gravity has eliminated all ETL processes since MySQL HeatWave can run both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads. As a result, the company delivers real-time analytics directly from MySQL HeatWave, without the need to index data beforehand.
Furthermore, with data-at-rest and in transit between MySQL Database and the nodes of the HeatWave cluster always encrypted, Gravity eliminates the risk of data being compromised, optimizes data security, and prevents any unauthorized access.
Gravity uses OCI Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) to protect critical database workloads in OCI with isolated network virtualization and microsecond latency. By assigning its private Internet Protocol (IP) address space and creating subnets, Gravity gained end-to-end control and ensured that specific server instances are prohibited from having public IP addresses, decreasing the risk of a network breach.
With OCI Flexible Load Balancer, Gravity automatically routes traffic across multiple fault and availability domains in the Oracle Cloud datacenter in Singapore, which increased the availability of its performance-demanding workloads, especially during peak times.
Gravity also decreased total cost of ownership (TCO) through MySQL HeatWave's pay-per-use pricing model.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
Gravity selected MySQL HeatWave Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure due to its pay-per-use pricing, on-demand scalability, and high availability across multiple availability and fault domains in Oracle Cloud's Singapore datacenter.
The company also valued the extensive security and cloud networking features necessary to enhance its security strategy. Furthermore, Gravity chose MySQL HeatWave as it is a managed database which enables quick resolution of any technical issues.
"MySQL HeatWave as a managed database service is a huge improvement for our operations," Peter Szabo comments.
Implementation
Gravity started its journey with Oracle in October 2021 when it joined the Oracle for Startups program. The company went live with MySQL HeatWave in January 2022.
"We received technical support from Oracle, but in essence, the documentation was comprehensive and that allowed us to migrate to MySQL HeatWave by ourselves, without the need of any external consulting firms," Peter Szabo says.