Customers around the world depend on EnterpriseDB for products, services and expertise. Our Postgres Plus® products are ideally suited for transaction-intensive and mixed-load applications, and they deliver critical Oracle® compatibility that allows customers to manage their database costs effectively. Customers rely on EnterpriseDB for our renowned 24x7 "follow the sun" technical support, our flexible training curricula and our convenient packaged service options.
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NTT, EnterpriseDB, and the PostgreSQL Open Source Community
The rapidly increasing adoption of open source software has radically altered enterprise IT. In particular, expectations about the total cost of ownership (TCO), the quality, and the flexibility of enterprise software have been completely reset. The open source software development paradigm has also fundamentally changed the relationship between enterprise software vendors and their customers, enabling them to productively collaborate with each other and with communities of talented volunteer software developers in ways that yesterday's proprietary commercial models simply did not permit.
The comprehensive partnership between NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, NYSE: NTT), the largest telecommunications company in Japan, and EnterpriseDB, the leading enterprise open source database company, illustrates the wide-ranging potential of these next-generation collaborations. Together with the PostgreSQL open source developer community, the companies are pushing the envelope of PostgreSQL's technical superiority, creating strategic business advantage for NTT and EnterpriseDB, and accelerating the worldwide adoption of PostgreSQL.
NTT and PostgreSQL
NTT recognized several years ago the many benefits that open source software can provide, including cost savings, increased code quality, and deployment and maintenance flexibility. As a mega-carrier with extraordinarily large-scale operations, NTT has particularly demanding software requirements. To address these requirements in the context of open source software, NTT founded the Open Source Software Center (OSSC) in April 2006. Today, OSSC continues to provide support services and technical information about open source software to the NTT family of companies and to contribute to open source communities.
One open source software community of particular interest to OSSC is PostgreSQL, which is widely regarded as the world's most advanced open source database. PostgreSQL has been in continuous development for more than 20 years, and has a well-deserved reputation for excellent architecture and world-class reliability, data integrity, and correctness. Database experts at OSSC consider PostgreSQL's features and performance to be comparable to commercial database products. Since its inception, OSSC has been promoting the deployment of PostgreSQL in the NTT family of companies and has contributed advanced features and bug reports to the PostgreSQL community.
As one of the largest companies involved with PostgreSQL, NTT provides the PostgreSQL community with a unique perspective. In return, NTT benefits greatly from the availability of open source database software with the scalability, reliability, and other carrier-grade characteristics that NTT requires.
The NTT Group has deployed hundreds of database-driven operation and business support systems. OSSC estimates that, over the past two years, NTT reduced its database TCO by several hundred million Yen (millions of U.S. dollars) by using PostgreSQL in many of these systems. NTT expects to increase its savings by up to a couple billion Yen during the next five years by doubling the size of its PostgreSQL deployment.
For mission-critical, highly transactional systems, NTT chooses PostgreSQL on the basis of its superior performance, scalability, and reliability. NTT also believes that, compared with the controlled communities of other open source databases, PostgreSQL's open community provides the company with better opportunities to influence the database's evolution. For example, NTT can request and contribute features and functionality of particular value in its large-scale distributed database environment.
EnterpriseDB: Commercial Success with PostgreSQL
EnterpriseDB is the world's leading provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL. The award-winning company was launched in 2005 and today serves more than 250 customers, including Sony Online Entertainment, FTD, hi5 Networks, Vonage, TDAmeritrade, and British Telecom. The company has strategic partnerships with IBM and NTT and more than 60 other partners, including Red Hat, Novell, and Business Objects (SAP).
EnterpriseDB enhanced PostgreSQL with more than 200 man-years of engineering to create the Postgres Plus® product family. Postgres Plus Standard Server is an open source distribution of the PostgreSQL database and includes significant performance benefits and important ease-of-use capabilities for developers and DBAs. Bundled into a one-click, cross-platform installer, Postgres Plus Standard Server is targeted at developers of next-generation applications and sets a new standard for commercial distributions of open source databases. Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a commercially licensed product that adds advanced capabilities to Postgres Plus Standard Server, including robust Oracle compatibility, dynamic performance tuning, and sophisticated management and monitoring. Postgres Plus products are ideally suited for transaction-intensive applications and deliver the performance, scalability, and reliability required for enterprise-class workloads.
EnterpriseDB employs more than 30% of the PostgreSQL core team, committers, and thought leaders. The company has contributed more features to the PostgreSQL code than any other organization and regularly provides the PostgreSQL open source community with financial, promotional, and other valuable support.
NTT and EnterpriseDB: A Strategic, PostgreSQL-Based Partnership
In October 2008, NTT and EnterpriseDB announced a comprehensive partnership that included an equity investment in EnterpriseDB by NTT Investment Partners. The principal goal of the partnership is to add new features to PostgreSQL through collaborative contributions to the PostgreSQL community. Other goals of the partnership include accelerating PostgreSQL deployment in the NTT operating companies and enabling the NTT companies to deliver PostgreSQL- and Postgres Plus-powered solutions to other companies.
Initially, the two partners will finalize and submit to the PostgreSQL community code for synchronous replication, a key technology for highly available database applications. This technology was originally developed for PostgreSQL by OSSC. Synchronous replication has several advantages over other high-availability solutions available today. For example, it eliminates the possibility of data loss, no dedicated shared disks are required, it achieves very-high-speed failover, and performance degradation is minimized. Importantly, synchronous replication is a critical high-availability alternative for cost-sensitive applications, because it can be deployed using commodity hardware.
Extending the Partners' Success
The close collaboration between EnterpriseDB, NTT, and the PostgreSQL open source community has already yielded impressive benefits. Soon, every PostgreSQL user will benefit from the advanced features and functionality the partners are contributing to the community, strengthening PostgreSQL's position as the world's most advanced open source database. In particular, the enhanced PostgreSQL database will be better able to meet NTT's demanding performance and high-availability requirements. And, EnterpriseDB has found a valuable long-term collaborator in NTT and its OSSC.
Additional collaborative technology development is already on the horizon for the two partners. Additional scalability and high-availability enhancements appropriate for large-scale distributed database environments in data centers, including features based on GridSQL®, EnterpriseDB's open source parallel query technology, will be pursued first.
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Global Floral Leader Provides Mission-Critical BI to Distributor Network
Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD) is the world's leading provider of floral-related products and services. With a network of 50,000 FTD affiliates spanning the globe, Chicago-based FTD processes approximately fifteen million orders annually through about 20,000 retail florists in the United States alone and enjoys revenues in excess of $450 million.
FTD's database applications are the epitome of mission-critical, especially during key holidays such as Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Mother's Day. In early 2007, FTD deployed a new shipping administration system to support its FedEx-based delivery business. The new system, called ARGO, is supported by a strategically important, external-facing reporting application based on Oracle.
The vendor-facing ARGO system tracks orders for products from more than 200 of FTD's vendors, allowing them to monitor shipments through pre-defined reports. These vendors represent a significant portion of FTD's online business, each running an average of eight to twelve reports per day. During FTD's peak seasons, the daily order volume increases significantly.
Valentine's Day Challenges
FTD typically receives 20 to 25 times the average daily order volume on Valentine's Day. On Valentine's Day, 2007, the ARGO database reporting application was degrading the performance of the company's order-taking database application. Performance slowed considerably as the volume of online inquiries increased, requiring reporting to be handled manually. The existing Oracle-based production infrastructure could not handle the reporting load, which was consuming an average of 90 percent of the 12-processor production system. FTD was forced to run vendor reporting manually to decrease the load on their production order-taking system. It was clear that a new vendor-facing reporting solution was urgently required prior to the Mother's Day holiday.
FTD, a long-term Oracle customer, initially turned to the industry giant, but was displeased with the quoted cost of the new system. The initial proposal for a new system, while discounted from the list price, was still far above the budget allotted for the project. As an alternative, FTD was referred to EnterpriseDB by Sun Microsystems®, provider of FTD's hardware and an EnterpriseDB technology partner.
A Replication Solution
FTD solved its peak-time reporting overload challenge by replicating major portions of the production Oracle database, including the Order table and the Customer table, onto Postgres Plus® Advanced Server using Postgres Plus Replication Server. The reporting application was then run on the Postgres Plus Advanced Server database rather than the Oracle database. No major changes were required to the Oracle reporting application to run it on the Postgres Plus Advanced Server database.
The entire Postgres Plus Advanced Server implementation, from initial technical consulting to production deployment, was completed in approximately six weeks. FTD was fully prepared for the Mother's Day rush.
Standing Ovation for the Mother's Day Triumph
FTD's vendors were ecstatic about the improved response time they experienced while running reports on Postgres Plus Advanced Server during the Mother's Day season. The EnterpriseDB solution had performed flawlessly. Following Mother's Day, FTD's development staff received a standing ovation from the entire executive team for their rapid deployment of a critical cost- and business-saving solution.
Further Savings
The performance of the servers supporting FTD's order-processing system also improved by 400% after the ARGO application was moved to Postgres Plus Advanced Server. The improvement allowed FTD to postpone purchasing additional hardware to support the system, saving the company even more money.
In addition to Postgres Plus Advanced Server's ability to run most applications written for Oracle unchanged, it also allowed FTD developers to use the Postgres Plus Advanced Server database and its tools without costly re-training.
"A Refreshing Change" in Technical Support Quality
EnterpriseDB offers enterprise-class technical support that is available around the clock. With a rapid average response time and on-call developers providing world-class customer service, EnterpriseDB provides Oracle customers with a compelling alternative.
What's Next for FTD and EnterpriseDB?
Postgres Plus Advanced Server provided FTD with the means to run a mission-critical application with increased performance at 83% less cost than a similar Oracle configuration. Subsequently, FTD has identified two other systems that will be transitioned from Oracle to Postgres Plus Advanced Server because of the anticipated cost and service benefits. As with ARGO, the vendor reporting application, no performance decrease or other technical compromise is expected.
In the future, Postgres Plus Advanced Server will be the first choice for new database deployments at FTD. The company is also considering replacing Oracle completely over the next two to three years.
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Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming
Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) is a recognized worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online games, with millions of gamers around the globe having enjoyed the company's products over the years. SOE has developed or published many ground-breaking and genre-defining games, including EverQuest®, EverQuest II®, Star Wars Galaxies®, PlanetSide®, The Matrix Online®, and many more.
SOE's database needs are considerable, and its database applications are the very definition of mission-critical: hundreds of thousands of online users play SOE's games around the clock, and each game is an extraordinarily database-intensive application. Before SOE selected EnterpriseDB, dozens of Oracle 9i RAC clusters were in use. In addition, SOE deploys databases in its back-office operations and to support its user forum and online auction websites.
Examining its business, SOE found that its Oracle databases were extremely expensive and that Oracle's licensing practices were inflexible and restrictive. At the same time, the company experienced a constant demand for the creation and maintenance of additional databases. Like many other companies today, SOE hoped that open source software might provide a solution to this business challenge.
Building on a History of Open Source Success
SOE has a history of success with open source software. The company has already successfully deployed Linux, Tomcat, Apache, and Hibernate. As early as 2005, the company began to investigate open source alternatives to Oracle that would have both a lower TCO and greater licensing flexibility. SOE also sought to leverage their valuable asset of in-house Oracle talent. SOE used four primary criteria in its selection of an open source database:
EnterpriseDB: A Clear Winner
At the end of a thorough review and selection process, SOE chose Postgres Plus® Advanced Server. An important factor in SOE's decision was Postgres Plus Advanced Server's ability to run database applications written for Oracle. SOE found that 80% of the applications it had selected to move from Oracle ran on Postgres Plus Advanced Server with little or no modification and that its Oracle-trained staff could immediately work comfortably and efficiently with Postgres Plus Advanced Server. Another important factor was Postgres Plus Advanced Server's PostgreSQL foundation, which guaranteed the reliability and stability that SOE required. Finally, Postgres Plus Advanced Server was available for only a small fraction of the cost of Oracle.
From Oracle to EnterpriseDB
SOE has evaluated the move of the massively multiplayer game The Matrix Online from Oracle to Postgres Plus Advanced Server, and the transition is planned for later this year. SOE is very pleased with the results of its testing to date, and it anticipates that new massively multiplayer online games will be deployed on EnterpriseDB in 2009. When the deployments are complete, Postgres Plus Advanced Server will be running on hundreds of SOE servers around the world.
High Availability on Postgres Plus Advanced Server
SOE's online games require high-availability database solutions. To achieve this, SOE will run Postgres Plus Advanced Server on a multi-node cluster with an idle node available for failover. Tests run by SOE have shown a very reasonable failover time using EnterpriseDB in this configuration when scripted at the operating system level. The renowned stability of PostgreSQL additionally means that Postgres Plus Advanced Server's failover capability will seldom be needed.
Online Game User Forums on Postgres Plus Advanced Server
SOE uses custom J-Forums to power the user forums for its online games. Previously, SOE used a hosted forum solution that ran on MySQL. When SOE found that the hosted solution couldn't easily be modified and new features couldn't easily be added, J-Forum was brought in-house and run on Postgres Plus Advanced Server. The deployment so far has been a resounding success. Half of SOE's online forums are now live on Postgres Plus Advanced Server, and the remainder will go live on EnterpriseDB in the coming months.
World-Class Technical Support
SOE is receiving terrific technical support from the EnterpriseDB team. Callbacks have been rapid, and the abundance of helpful solutions and example code compares very favorably with the technical support SOE receives from Oracle.
What's Next for SOE and EnterpriseDB?
SOE is extremely pleased with the success it has already had with EnterpriseDB and plans to continue moving applications from Oracle to Postgres Plus Advanced Server to realize even greater cost savings. SOE's future massively multiplayer online games are expected to be deployed solely on EnterpriseDB and, within 18 months, hundreds of servers around the world will run Postgres Plus Advanced Server. Open source software from EnterpriseDB has provided SOE with a solution to its business challenge: SOE has found a way to reduce its database TCO by nearly 80% and has realized a licensing flexibility that is critical to its organization.
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The #1 Social Network in More than 25 Countries
hi5's service was launched in 2003 and is now one of the world's largest social networks with more than 56 million monthly visitors. It is ranked as a top 20 website globally by Alexa, and it is the leading social network in more than 25 countries. hi5 is also the world's leading Spanish-language social network. More than 80 million people in more than 200 nations are currently registered for hi5, which is available in 23 languages. Individuals use hi5 to stay connected, to share information with friends and family around the world, to meet new people, to express their identities, and to discover linkages throughout their lives.
hi5 operates one of the world's largest commercial OLTP PostgreSQL installations, running on hundreds of servers. Nearly all of the hi5 social network services run on PostgreSQL, and all subscriber data, including profiles, photos, and comments, are stored on and retrieved from the company's PostgreSQL system. The system supports the data transactions of more than 56 million active users each month. In June 2008, the company delivered more than 18.5 billion page views that were supported by PostgreSQL, serving nearly 11 million visitors to the site every day.
Challenge: Enormous Scale and Continuous Uptime
One of hi5's biggest IT infrastructure challenges, particularly given its huge international user base, is that the hi5 service cannot be taken down for maintenance. The company's PostgreSQL system must run and perform well 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year to serve users around the globe. Any issues must be resolved in real time, with the system still running. The scale and nature of the hi5 service mean that the company is stressing the database in ways that very few organizations do. hi5 also requires highly performant database replication, which is not natively available in PostgreSQL. hi5 found that PostgreSQL talent with experience in always-on environments was difficult to locate and employ, and determined that the assistance of expert PostgreSQL consultants was required to meet its unique challenges.
World-Class Professional Services from EnterpriseDB
hi5 selected EnterpriseDB over other firms providing professional services and support for PostgreSQL because of EnterpriseDB's dedicated focus on PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus® family of products is based on PostgreSQL, and the company is the world's leading provider of PostgreSQL-based products and services. EnterpriseDB employs more of the PostgreSQL open source community's core team, committers, and thought leaders than any other company. EnterpriseDB's unparalleled PostgreSQL expertise provided hi5 with the assurance that its unique challenges could be met and supported by the world's leading experts.
Architectural Health Check
EnterpriseDB began the hi5 consulting engagement with an Architectural Health Check (AHC), one of EnterpriseDB's standard packaged services. Delivered in only three days, the AHC identifies areas needing improvement in customers' PostgreSQL systems. For hi5, the resulting updates provided a variety of benefits, including lower disk utilization, which in turn lowered expensive storage requirements and thereby reduced cost. Responsive time performance was also measurably improved by implementing the AHC recommendations.
Remote DBA
In addition to providing expert consulting services and applying deep PostgreSQL knowledge to complex database issues, the EnterpriseDB team supplements the work of hi5's internal DBA team with a Remote DBA service, helping to absorb hi5's DBA workload during peak periods. The Remote DBA service flexibly provides EnterpriseDB's customers with cost-effective manpower to perform day-to-day database administration and maintenance tasks, including backups, query tuning, monitoring, and data center migrations.
Wide Range of Benefits
As additional examples of how hi5 has benefited from its relationship with EnterpriseDB, the EnterpriseDB services team quickly recovered data corrupted by a hardware failure. EnterpriseDB has also provided patches to the PostgreSQL code, meeting hi5's particular requirements for using PostgreSQL in a unique way. Together, hi5 and EnterpriseDB are helping to establish best practices for running PostgreSQL in always-on, online transaction processing (OLTP) environments.
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Next-Generation Intelligent Mapping Solutions
FortiusOne provides next-generation intelligent mapping solutions that make the world's geographic data accessible to everyone for learning, decision-making, and problem-solving. The company is leading the way toward the next generation of the web with breakthrough SmartWeb technologies that offer unprecedented access to data, easy remixing of data for specific needs, and rich information visualization to grow collective knowledge.
FortiusOne developed GeoCommons®, a popular destination website that enables anyone to explore, create, and share geographic data and intelligent maps. GeoCommons houses a large geospatial database with more than two million attributes, 35,000 variables, and 1,500 datasets. As a fast-growing startup, FortiusOne required a low-cost, powerful database solution to run GeoCommons.
Challenges with MySQL
Originally, FortiusOne selected MySQL; however, when FortiusOne was preparing to deploy the first public beta of GeoCommons, they encountered major performance roadblocks. MySQL's limited and incomplete spatial support dramatically impacted GeoCommons' performance; additionally, MySQL was unable to deliver enterprise-class features and performance at an affordable price. Finally, FortiusOne preferred to support and open-source-based technology.
An Enterprise-Class Solution Based on PostgreSQL
The PostGIS geospatial extensions to PostgreSQL played a key role in FortiusOne's selection of Postgres Plus® Advanced Server and dramatically improved performance. Postgres Plus Advanced Server's PostgreSQL foundation guaranteed the reliability and stability that FortiusOne required, at a small fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise databases.
Overall System Performance Improves with EnterpriseDB
FortiusOne needed to run complex spatial queries against large datasets quickly and efficiently, and found the MySQL spatial extensions to be far less complete and comprehensive than PostGIS. Postgres Plus Advanced Server processes some of GeoCommons' database-intensive rendering requests in 1/30 of the time required by MySQL. During peak loads, GeoCommons processes more than 100,000 complex requests per hour, requiring the true enterprise-class performance and scalability delivered by EnterpriseDB.
Another major factor in FortiusOne's replacement of MySQL with Postgres Plus Advanced Server was the company's need for advanced partitioning, custom triggers, and functional indexing. Postgres Plus Advanced Server's advanced partitioning capabilities instantly enabled linear performance, even with tables having billions of rows. Since migrating GeoCommons from MySQL to Postgres Plus Advanced Server, FortiusOne has improved overall system performance by 80%.
Quality Technical Support
EnterpriseDB offers round-the-clock, enterprise-class technical support. Customers receive rapid responses and helpful solutions from on-call developers, providing a compelling alternative to other enterprise databases.
What's Next for FortiusOne and EnterpriseDB?
FortiusOne is extremely pleased with the results it has received from Postgres Plus Advanced Server. Open source software from EnterpriseDB has indeed provided FortiusOne with a solution to its business challenge: to run complex queries quickly and efficiently, at an affordable price. When considering database options for future products, EnterpriseDB will be at the top of FortiusOne's list.
