France Billet

France Billet Stakes Online Ticket Sales
on High Availability of MySQL Enterprise Edition

"MySQL Enterprise Edition with ever-increasing availability and transaction throughput gives us the peace of mind to cope with periodic surges in ticket sales and access control because any downtime would be catastrophic. The MySQL database is constantly evolving and we're looking forward to using latest features such as group replication and pseudonymization to add even more value to our investment."

Michael Briot
Technical Architect
France Billet SAS

Introduction

France Billet is a ticketing platform belonging to the French FNAC-Darty cultural and home appliance chain, selling tickets to concerts, theaters, festivals, sports events, and theme parks. It also provides its B2B partners (large distributors and others) with SaaS ticketing solutions, enabling them to manage ticket sales transparently.

As a company with an open source strategy, France Billet in 2005 selected the MySQL relational database management system to transform its centralized reservation system. Today it uses the MySQL Enterprise Edition databases to run its 3 major platforms: a central booking system, e-commerce sites, and a partner extranet.

In the ticketing and access control business, high availability and scalability of databases is essential to cope with peaks and troughs in demand, which is why France Billet adopted MySQL as its online transaction processing (OLTP) system. In addition, it uses MySQL to underpin its own analytical data warehouse. Currently it licenses the product annually for 3 Oracle Linux production servers and 3 pre-production servers.

Business Challenges & Goals

  • Ensure high availability of e-commerce ticketing databases to cater for peaks and troughs in demand and guarantee fluid access to events for ticketholders
  • Increase visibility of database and server performance to proactively monitor and troubleshoot problems affecting B2B partners and consumers
  • Speed up time to backup and restore the central booking, website, and extranet databases to support high availability of ticketing

Business Results & Metrics

  • Achieved high availability of ticketing systems through the performance gains realized with MySQL Enterprise Edition and sysbench tests, multiplying the number of transactions per second up to 4 times within 2 years
  • Ensured fluid running of ticketing platforms through the real-time visibility into the performance and availability of MySQL databases obtained with MySQL Enterprise Monitoring, which captures behavior metrics and alerts the production team to query performance and point-in-time database anomalies
  • Reduced backup time for the central booking system to 60 minutes and to 12 minutes for the website platform using the physical hot backup capabilities of MySQL Enterprise Backup, which also results in faster restore times for ticketing database
  • Provided ticket distributors and other partners with continuous access, access to the company's central booking system, ensuring that both ticketing partners and consumers enjoy a positive shopping experience with France Billet

Why MySQL Enterprise Edition

"We chose MySQL Enterprise Edition for its superior price-performance ratio, ease of scalability, and uptime. It has become a world class database management system and represents the best online transaction processing database for our ticketing business. Also, Oracle consistently enriches the product with valuable functionality," said Matthieu Dumoulin, Head of IT System at France Billet SAS.

Implementation

France Billet began using the MySQL Community Edition in 2005, before Sun Systems bought it in 2008 and Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. It deployed successive versions of the MySQL Enterprise Edition until version 8.0, testing features ahead of upgrade and enjoying Oracle Premier Support. The company deployed MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.0 in June 2019.

Future MySQL Products

Upon moving to version 8.0 France Billet intends taking advantage of new features and enhanced functionality. In particular, it is contemplating the use of native pseudonymization of data through MySQL Enterprise Masking and De-identification, a procedure for replacing personally identifiable information fields with artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms, in its pre-production environments. It will also adopt MySQL Group Replication to simplify server replication and administration.