FANCOMI accelerates ad analytics by 10X with MySQL HeatWave

FANCOMI aims to become the world’s largest performance marketing advertising network that allows advertisers to pay when their desired marketing outcome is achieved, instead of the traditional way, when the ads are placed. Monitoring and measuring the impact of 20,000 advertisements to 2.6 million agencies and media websites 24 hours a day, as well as developing dynamic, cost-effective advertising plans for agencies and media publishers, requires a robust data management platform.

The company initially used Oracle Database running on AWS RDS and MySQL running on AWS Aurora with support provided by a contracted database administrator. However, with the rapid growth in data volume from the rise in the number of advertisers and publishers internationally and the variety of digital channels, the company was experiencing decreased processing speed of its data analysis, which is critical to calculating advertising performance and payment services.

FANCOMI found that Aurora MySQL could not meet the real-time analytics performance requirement for performance-based advertising on the internet, where optimal outcomes and channels can be determined in seconds. Complex queries would take longer than a minute or time out with no response due to memory shortage. To complete the analytics queries, FANCOMI would have to move the media and advertising data from the transactional database to a separate data warehouse, adding time and costs. Furthermore, there was a limit on the throughput capacity per instance, meaning that monthly charges would potentially more than double.

To solve these performance problems, the ad network started to review and verify alternative solutions that met criteria, including superior scalability and performance, improved systems operation efficiency, management, and data processing. It also needed in-house development and operations, without modifying the ad performance application.

FANCOMI migrated its advertising and billing applications from AWS Aurora to MySQL HeatWave and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for increased performance, reduced costs, and ease of use.

HeatWave enables the company’s developers to run OLTP and OLAP workloads directly from their MySQL database, eliminating the need for data movement and integration with a separate analytics database. Autonomous Transaction Processing extends the proven capabilities of the Oracle Database for the company, with superior throughput performance to existing clouds. It applies machine learning to provisioning, patching, and security—eliminating database administration.

The new data management platform will enable FANCOMI to add more data sources, better leverage analytics, and scale to meet the requirements of its growing affiliate network and media creators.

Migrating from AWS Aurora to MySQL HeatWave not only increased complex performance by 10X to generate real-time analytics but also significantly reduced costs, since FANCOMI no longer had to move the data to an analytical database. Also, the company did not have to modify its application to realize the dramatic performance improvement.

Using Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing for its database platform for its billing system, FANCOMI can now deploy a database in minutes with superior performance, availability, and security. It provides simplified operation and performance monitoring with reduced staff hours and processes because of its automation and machine learning. Autoscaling ensures FANCOMI has the increased capacity for onboarding new clients or demand peaks without disruption, and scales down when idle so that the company pays only for the capacity it needs. Also of great value was Oracle’s Bring Your Own License program, reduced the Oracle Database migration and operational costs by using the company’s existing licenses.

The company used the Rapid Start Service provided by Oracle Consulting to speed the time to insight and do so at an optimal cost. It also meant that the migration to OCI was able to take place without drawing on support from FANCOMI’s IT team.