The Client
ReviMedia is a broker for online advertising. Their system connects brands who want to buy advertising with companies selling advertising space. ReviMedia then also creates advertisements for the buyer.
This buying and selling of online advertising space generates millions of transactions per day, and data about each transaction needs to be stored in their SQL Servers.
The Problem
ReviMedia sells hundreds of millions of euros in online advertising every year. As a result, they have millions of transactions moving from their website into their databases every month. After executing an internal technical audit, they discovered that some transactions recorded on the website were not processed and charged to the customer. These errors were causing a loss of roughly half a million euros every month.
ReviMedia suspected their database was causing the problem but didn’t have an in-house DBA to validate and diagnose. Multiple Data Platform MSPs and consultants, despite running health checks on ReviMedia’s database, could find nothing wrong.
Then, ReviMedia heard of Data Masterminds’ specialized expertise in pinpointing SQL Server problems. They came to Data Masterminds for help.
“Our Health Check enables us to walk into the client’s situation and pinpoint their pain almost immediately. The diagnosis is pretty much instantaneous. Within the hour, we can say, ‘This is exactly where your pain is’. We can and do replicate this with other clients.”
William Durkin, Data Masterminds
The senior consultants at Data Masterminds quickly discovered that ReviMedia’s eCommerce platform was failing to insert records of purchases into SQL Server. ReviMedia’s SQL Server didn’t have enough capacity for the new records, which caused them to lose data inserts to blocking and locking.
Database blocking happens when a query locks a specific data record in the SQL Server and a second query attempts to lock down that same record before the owning query releases it. The second query must then wait until the first query releases the lock. When this happens to millions of data records, you can easily understand why a SQL Server slows down and misses inserts.
The analysis also determined that the servers weren’t responding quickly enough to incoming sales data, so records of new sales weren’t arriving or retained. ReviMedia’s database architecture just didn’t have the capacity to hold the huge amounts of transactional data they needed. This lack of available capacity, compounded with database blocking, was causing serious damage to their business.
The Solution
To solve any further performance problems, Data Masterminds removed all query blocking and increased server capacity to make SQL Server faster and more responsive. ReviMedia wanted the least disruptive approach in reconfiguring their software, so Data Masterminds implemented an In-Memory OLTP (Online Transactional Processing software) to ensure the changes were transparent on the front end.
The In-Memory OLTP is a storage optimization technology that is incredibly efficient at handling numerous transactions for many users at once. Its integration with ReviMedia’s database gave their SQL Server the boost it needed to deliver faster response times and higher throughput. And, most importantly, it unlocked their SQL Server’s ability to multiply sales.
ReviMedia wanted back all the revenue they had lost. Their business goals were to increase sales by 20x in 12 months. With their new In-Memory OLTP powering their SQL Server, this magnitude of scale is easily achievable.
After Data Masterminds increased their server capacity and resolved their performance issues, a single insert took a much shorter time to process—only 0.02 milliseconds instead of their original half second. Now, instead of being limited by a processing time of 350 inserts per second, ReviMedia could now process 8,000 inserts with a load testing of 45,000 inserts per second. This faster processing time combined with increased server capacity already saved them $300,000 per month in revenue. Once they scale to thousands of inserts per second—a massive increase from their original processing time—their target of 20x their original sales will be in sight in no time.
“ReviMedia runs a transactional platform for lead generation. With tens of millions of transactions per day, our volume was increasing so rapidly that our SQL Server database could hardly keep up with our growth. We met Data Masterminds, and from the very first start of the partnership, they proved to be knowledgeable, experienced, practical, and solution driven. They have been instrumental in helping us achieve our scalability goals and are a great team to work with.”
Louis Kinsbergen, CTO ReviMedia
Conclusion
As shown in ReviMedia’s case, simply improving the performance of your SQL Server can result in a huge, positive business impact. We recommend conducting regular database Health Checks to help you spot issues as they arise and prevent them from turning into major problems. These Health Checks are the first step to achieving data maturity.
Does your SQL Server need a Health Check?
We can help you out—just reach out to our team at info@datamasterminds.io.
We can help ensure that the next data disaster doesn’t derail your day.
