StayFriends Secures a Leading Position Among European Social Media Sites with Robust, High-Performance, Relational Database
 
 

StayFriends Secures a Leading Position Among European Social Media Sites with Robust, High-Performance, Relational Database

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StayFriends GmbH is one of the leading Websites for tracking down and finding your former school friends in Germany (StayFriends.de), Austria (StayFriends.at), Switzerland (StayFriends.ch), France (Trombi.com) and Sweden (StayFriends.se). With a user base of more than 28 million, StayFriends operates several internet sites in Europe.

StayFriends has built its infrastructure on Oracle’s MySQL Database since its founding. With MySQL Enterprise Edition, the company continues to benefit from its powerful replication mechanism, comprehensive monitoring and query-analyzing capabilities, and the ability to use different storage engines. It also offers low operation and maintenance costs in comparison to its benefits.

MySQL Enterprise Edition provides the scalability that StayFriends needs to keep pace with performance requirements in the years to come.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from StayFriends GmbH

  • “We have been relying on Oracle’s MySQL database for almost 10 years now. Being the core component in our IT infrastructure, it enables us to keep pace with constantly growing data volume. In addition, we have reaped the benefits of continuous improvements to the product and its performance.” – Oliver Gutperl, Vice President, Technology, StayFriends GmbH

  • Identify an easy-to-deploy and easily manageable relational database for a social media site that started with a few servers in 2002 and today operates leading sites across five countries with more than 100 Intel-based commodity servers
  • Ensure seamless, database scalability to enable future growth
  • Rely exclusively on open-source technologies to keep maintenance and operational costs at the lowest level and tap into a wealth of experienced professionals

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Selected Oracle’s MySQL Database when StayFriends was founded to provide a start-up social media company, with limited resources, an easy-to-deploy and affordable, yet scalable and reliable data foundation on which it could grow rapidly
  • Used MySQL Enterprise Edition for all business-critical online applications—such as billing and payments systems, bug tracking, and wikis—to enable employees to conveniently access them via a Web browser
  • Enabled StayFriends to efficiently administer user data as well as statistical data, financial data, Website contents, and corporate information and become a leading European social media site with a user base of more than 28 million members
  • Ensured on demand scalability to keep pace with performance requirements in years to come by relying on the replication of a master-slave configuration that helps distribute workloads across more than 100 MySQL servers and enables IT personnel to respond to business demands for additional database capacity by simply installing MySQL on commodity servers and replicating those servers
  • Used MySQL Query Analyzer to enhance the speed and frequency of database queries and simplify evaluation by pinpointing precisely which programming code statement causes a database function to respond too slowly, an important feature for a company that runs Websites receiving millions of hits daily and launches new releases of its Websites at least every two weeks
  • Achieved a high level of stability by monitoring all MySQL deployments—which currently handle 1 terabyte of information—with MySQL Enterprise Monitor and collected the information required to continuously adapt the company’s systems to its increasing performance needs
  • Made it easy for StayFriends to recruit qualified personnel to manage its database servers—as there is a strong MySQL skill base in the market—and helped to create an experienced and stable in-house team of developers and administrators with a rich MySQL knowledge base

Why Oracle

“When we had to decide on our database system 10 years ago, we considered MySQL the leading open-source solution and, therefore, opted for this system. Today, our key reasons for using MySQL Enterprise Edition continue to be its powerful replication mechanism, comprehensive monitoring and query analyzing capabilities, and the possibility of using different storage engines, in addition to its very low operation and maintenance costs in comparison to its benefits,” said Oliver Gutperl, vice president, technology, StayFriends GmbH.