Introduction
BitCash Inc. is a major Japanese issuer of prepaid electronic money, or BitCash. Customers can purchase BitCash via their mobile devices or charge card at convenience stores. The company aims to provide a safe and convenient payment solution for online games and various forms of digital content, such as music, videos, and e-books.
With fierce competition from retail and telecom giants, such as Seven-Eleven, Rakuten, and KDDI, in the electronic money market, BitCash wanted to diversify its business to other revenue streams rather than just online games. To achieve this goal, the company wanted to build a clustered database to improve system response time and data availability and support future growth.
Challenges
- Expedite the importation or aggregation of data from a vast number of participating merchants and agencies, such as product codes and deposit payments, by using a highly available and affordable MySQL database to optimize performance
- Support the business in expanding its services to other areas, such as running e-sports for tournaments, by ensuring high database performance and availability
- Adopt an infrastructure capable of scaling easily and cost effectively to millions of users of online betting platforms
- Gain the ability to remotely replicate data and build a disaster recovery site at Okinawa in the future
Results
- Processed online transactions for electronic money faster by upgrading the legacy database for merchant applications - which accounts for 30 to 40% of the business processes - to MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition and accelerating the overall system response time by up to 30x
- Saved significant consulting fees by gaining 24/7 global support and direct access to engineers with Oracle Premier Support and ensuring the availability of the in-house database instead of spending US$268,000 to engage external consultants in the past
- Supported business expansion by shortening the time to aggregate large volumes of data from merchants, such as depositing payment for online games or e-sports, to just up to eight hours rather than one full day, thanks to the linear performance of MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition
- Ensured seamless data migration by reducing the time to import data by over few hundred times - just 30 minutes instead of 1 week - and receiving rapid responses from Oracle Premier Support to resolve system failure issues
- Minimized risks associated with unpredictable workloads at the application level by running the clustered database completely on memory with MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition
- Reduced burden for system engineers by automating synchronization across clusters instead of manually creating scripts and gaining the assistance from Oracle Premier Support to minimize the tuning time for parameters during data migration
- Increased database resiliency and availability and supported a future plan to launch a disaster recovery site by leveraging the active-active geographic replication capability of MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition to replicate data in a remote location
- Cut further costs to introduce new hardware or engineered system by constructing and running a clustered database at the middleware level
- Ensured continuous business operation by using the features of MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition to enable real-time monitoring of the performance, availability, and health status of the clustered database
Why Oracle
"We selected MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition over other vendors, including PostgreSQL and Microsoft, for its superior clustering capability and active-active feature. The solution is also more cost effective to support our future expansion," - Koichi Kawashima, General Manager, Information System Department, BitCash Inc.
Execution
After a three-month selection process, BitCash adopted MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition. It then developed the new clustered database and completed the data migration for merchant applications in just three months. BitCash plans to expand the clustered database to membership applications and build a disaster recovery site in the future.
"The greatest challenge for us was the extensive time to migrate large volume of data from our merchant applications. Thanks to Oracle Premier Support, we optimized parameter setting and quickly resolved any issues", Kawashima said. "Oracle Premier Support really went out their way and answered our inquiries - even the ones not covered in the support contract."