Brazilian analytical platform developer gains performance and scalability by hosting its solution on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with MySQL HeatWave.
Introduction & Background
Intelecto Consultoria e Desenvolvimento de Sistemas Ltda (Intelectivo) is a Brazilian company that provides business intelligence (BI) solutions through a data integration and analysis platform called Plugger BI. The platform offers valuable business data for visualization and analysis by creating connections to the application programming interfaces (APIs) of sales and marketing data sources, CRM software, e-commerce platforms, and others.
Business Challenges & Goals
For more than a decade since its startup in 2006, Intelectivo operated with an on-premises connection to its customers’ servers, who provided the infrastructure. They used a third-party extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool to transfer data into Plugger BI. This data was then subjected to analysis through customizable dashboards, pivot grids, data cubes, reports, and other templates. The back-end database utilized was MySQL Community Edition.
However, relying on the customer’s infrastructure for the solution meant that Intelectivo had no control over the performance of its BI system. The platform team was at the mercy of various external factors—such as server migration, configurations, downtime, fluctuating corporate workloads, new software installations, and other elements that affected availability and speed.
As Intelectivo grew, it became evident that hosting its product on customer servers was limiting Plugger BI’s ability to handle increased data processing requirements. As a result, certain large accounts began turning to online analytical processing (OLAP) tools like Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.
It was, therefore, essential to transition away from on premises infrastructure and move to a cloud platform that offered scalability and superior performance, as well as eliminated the challenges and duplication of ETL processes.
For many years, Intelectivo had reservations about moving to a Cloud provider due to concerns about limited control of its infrastructure. However, due to the urgent need for scalability and to continue using MySQL as its database, the company decided to host Plugger BI on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using MySQL HeatWave for data processing.
Business Results & Metrics
With MySQL HeatWave’s scalability, the Brazilian BI solutions provider enhanced the customer experience across a range of companies that require analysis of small or very large volumes of data. Plugger BI gained the ability to rapidly pull and store data 40X faster from various customer platforms such as marketing, social media, e-commerce, and customer relationship platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Insights, Pipedrive, and Magento 2.
In addition, Plugger BI seamlessly integrates with databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Firebird, Postgres, and Progress, as well as text files, Excel spreadsheets, and others.
Thanks to the performance, high availability, and scalability of OCI, Intelectivo’s customers have gained superior insight into their marketing and sales strategies through real-time cloud access to analytical data stored in MySQL HeatWave.
Creation and interrogation of dashboards now flow seamlessly since MySQL HeatWave—with its single database for online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads—delivers data from customer apps instantly, without the complexity, latency, and cost of ETL duplication.
OCI’s auto-scaling ability to allocate the appropriate computing resources according to peaks and troughs of data flow provides Intelectivo customers with maximum flexibility to visualize and generate analysis on demand. Customers immediately noticed the improved performance of Plugger BI, with dashboards appearing faster, thanks to the migration from unreliable on premises servers to OCI’s maximum availability architecture and security.
By deploying Plugger BI on OCI, Intelectivo gained control over performance and configuration, as well as onboarding. During account set-up, every new customer is allocated space for storing web app data, connects its APIs directly to MySQL HeatWave, and can begin analyzing its critical data within minutes.
By using a fully managed, single database service for OLTP and OLAP, the platform team can focus on tasks that add business value rather than on database maintenance.
Through the utilization of DevOps tools, specifically OCI Functions, the Plugger BI team has achieved faster time-to-market. This is because developers can take advantage of pre-existing functions that aid in writing, building, packaging, deploying, and maintaining code. Consequently, this results in improved query performance and more precise insights.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
Intelectivo began evaluating AWS, Azure, and Google as possible providers for its Plugger BI solutions. The company wanted a platform that supported the MySQL database, but, primarily, it needed scalability.
When Intelectivo contacted Oracle, the MySQL support team proactively weighed in with suggestions on how to boost Plugger BI availability and scalability on OCI. The company chose MySQL HeatWave, realizing the advantage of having one engine for OLTP, OLAP,and ML—and, above all, no longer any need for using customers’ infrastructure.
Furthermore, since Intelectivo had been using MySQL as the database from the beginning, it was pleased to move to OCI, since it was the cloud infrastructure of its database provider – MySQL.
After testing with a number of small customers it was found that the ease of configuration and setup, as well as the control it would gain compared to being limited by customer servers, were reason enough to choose MySQL HeatWave on OCI.
Throughout the selection process and implementation, Intelectivo benefited from proactive support from the MySQL team, who continually suggested the most cost-efficient path for providing powerful BI solutions to clients.
“The MySQL team understood my challenges precisely and always provided assistance when needed. Their support was consistently excellent and very important," said Cristiano Longo.
Next Steps
Intelectivo has plans to further capitalize on the opportunity to provide its customers with a robust platform for analyzing data from social media, e-commerce apps, and other sources. It consistently evaluates competing business intelligence products, and always finds that Oracle has innovative features.
“Today, we can confidently say that OCI is the best solution for what we want to offer to the market with our platform. It’s simply the best: Oracle has everything we need. MySQL HeatWave continues to exceed our expectations, especially given all the machine learning capabilities it provides,” said Cristiano Longo.