Full  360  is  a  systems  integrator  and  consultancy  with  broad  experience  in  data  warehousing,  business  intelligence,  and  performance  management.  It  has  developed  analy?c  solu?ons  for  a  wide  range  of  clients,  from  ISVs  and  eCommerce  sites  to  Global  10  financial  ins?tu?ons.  As  one  of  the  first  integrators  to  focus  on  the  intersec?on  of  data  warehousing  and  the  cloud,  Full  360  has  integrated  Ver?ca  and  JaspersoH  BI  via  OpsCode  Chef  to  deliver  the  elas?cBI(tm)  plaMorm  on  the  Amazon  Web  Services  (AWS)  Cloud.

Founded  in  June  2009,  BigDoor  is  a  SeaSle-­‐based  startup  dedicated  to  making  the  online  world  more  rewarding  by  providing  gamifica?on  technology  to  non-­‐gaming  websites.  Its  goal  is  to  provide  the  means  for  a  healthier  and  happier  internet  ecosystem:  more  enjoyable  and  relevant  ?me  online  for  users,  and  more  crea?ve  revenue  opportuni?es  for  businesses.  BigDoor  is  accomplishing  this  goal  by  developing  a  virtual  economy  plaMorm  that  helps  web  developers  and  digital  publishers  add  customized  game  mechanics  to  their  sites  or  apps,  thus  allowing  them  to  increase  user  loyalty,  beSer  mone?ze  user  interac?ons,  and  more  effec?vely  target  new  and  exis?ng  customers.

The Application

At  the  center  of  BigDoor’s  model  is  the  development  of  a  custom  “points”  system  for  its  clients.  “We  essen?ally  create  a  fun  and  engaging  frequent  flyer  program  for  websites,”  explains  CTO  and  Co-­‐Founder  Jeff  Malek.  “People  who  visit  the  websites  earn  points  based  on  ac?vi?es,  which  are  accrued  by  transac?ons  via  the  API.”

Before  bringing  in  Ver?ca,  BigDoor  drew  data  from  a  replicated  slave  of  its  MySQL  transac?onal  database  and  aggregated  the  results  on  an  addi?onal  intermediary  MySQL  host,  before  finally  pulling  summary  data  into  Tableau  for  repor?ng  and  front-­‐end  business  intelligence.

The Challenge

Yet  the  complexity  of  ques?ons  BigDoor  sought  to  answer  for  its  clients—total  transac?ons  run,  points  earned  in  a  given  hour,  and  others—outstripped  its  ability  to  query  the  data.  “We  were  facing  all  of  the  typical  problems  of  custom  aggrega?ons  and  ETL,”  Malek  said.  “Some?mes  the  aggrega?ons  were  off;  some?mes  MySQL  slaves  got  behind;  some?mes  there  was  a  break  in  the  ETL  implementa?on.  On  top  of  that,  the  en?re  process  required  our  engineers  to  know  our  aggrega?on  schema,  SQL,  and  shell  scripts  to  the  point  where  they  could  manage  the  system.  As  a  resource-­‐constrained  start-­‐up,  it  just  wasn’t  sustainable.”

CASE STUDY Full 360 and BigDoor

“Vertica is the most exciting thing to happen to business intelligence in 20 years...”

- Larry Hill, Director of Business Development, Full 360

An HP Company

Discover the Power of Vertica The Vertica Analytics Platform enables companies to monetize 100% of their data through analytic insights. Built from the ground up, Vertica was designed with 21st century Big Data challenges in mind. Key features include :

Real-time AnalyticsDealing with your data in real-time – consume, analyze and make decisions at the speed of business.

Advanced In-Database AnalyticsFlexible library of features and functions to explore and process data close to the CPU core.

Agile DeploymentMaximizing !exibility - deploy Vertica on industry standard hardware, virtual machines, or on the cloud.

Fastest Time to ValueShortening the time to value - monetizing your data in a matter of minutes, not hours, months or years.

Scale-Out MPP ArchitectureAutomatically scale linearly and limitlessly by adding industry standard x86 servers to the grid.

Native BI, ETL, & Hadoop IntegrationSeamlessly integrate with a robust and ever growing ecosystem of analytics solutions.

Vertica - Analytics Everywhere™

www.vertica.com/evaluate

Cloud

Mobile

Sensor

Individual

Services

Monetize

BetterDecisions

RealTime

Analysis

Statistics

About VerticaVertica, an HP Company, is the leading provider of next-generation analytics platforms enabling customers to monetize ALL of their data. The elasticity, scale, performance, and simplicity of the Vertica Analytics Platform are unparalleled in the industry, delivering 50x-1000x the performance of traditional solutions at 30% the total cost of ownership. With data warehouses and data marts ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to multiple petabytes, Vertica’s 600+ customers are rede"ning the speed of business and competitive advantage. Vertica powers some of the largest organizations and most innovative business models globally including Zynga, Groupon, Twitter, Verizon, Guess Inc., Admeld, Capital IQ, Mozilla, AT&T, and Comcast.

Vertica, An HP Company 8 Federal Street, Billerica, MA 01821 +1.978.600.1000 TEL +1.978.600.1001 FAX www.vertica.com© Vertica 2012. All rights reserved. All other company, brand and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

The Solution

BigDoor  decided  to  move  away  from  its  custom  ETL  solu?on  and  into  a  more  mature  data  warehousing  plaMorm.  Malek  said  he  chose  Full  360  and  Ver?ca  because  the  solu?on  was  both  advanced  and  easy  to  implement.  “There  couldn’t  have  been  a  beSer  fit  for  what  we  needed,”  he  said.  “Ver?ca  had  a  reputa?on  for  being  flat-­‐out  fast;  Full  360  made  the  informa?on-­‐gathering,  licensing,  and  installa?on  process  simple.  It  was  perfect.”

Using  Opscode  Chef,  an  open-­‐source  systems  integra?on  framework  built  specifically  for  automa?ng  the  cloud,  Full  360  created  a  custom  configura?on  for  BigDoor.  “We  can  generate  a  custom  image  for  somebody  literally  in  an  hour…an  hour  and  five  minutes  if  they  don’t  have  an  Amazon  account,”  said  Larry  Hill,  Director  of  Business  Development  at  Full  360.  “We  can  get  people  in  business  and  using  Ver?ca  in  the  same  day.”

BigDoor’s  first  project  was  to  transfer  all  of  the  aggrega?ons  that  were  being  done  on  cron  jobs  via  custom  shell  scrip?ng  and  SQL  to  Ver?ca.  Full  360  did  all  of  the  heavy  liHing  to  transfer  the  work  over.  “It  was  a  lot  easier  to  implement  than  I  expected,”  Malek  said.  “We  were  up  and  running  very  quickly.”

BigDoor’s  Ver?ca  backend  now  operates  en?rely  in  the  Amazon  Web  Services’  Elas?c  Compute  Cloud  (EC2),  running  on  Amazon’s  standard  extra  large  instances.  Each  m1.xlarge  provides  15  GB  memory;  8  EC2  Compute  Units  (4  virtual  cores  with  2  EC2  Compute  Units  each);  1,690  GB  instance  storage;  and  a  64-­‐bit  plaMorm.

“The  beauty  is  that  an  m1.xlarge  is  64  cents  an  hour  on  demand,  which  is  about  $5,000  per  year,”  said  Hill.  “And  you  can  cut  that  charge  almost  50%  if  you  do  a  one-­‐year  commit,  so  the  environment  is  really  inexpensive.  You  get  an  incredible  amount  of  processing  power  for  your  money.”

On  its  legacy  stack,  BigDoor  uses  Con?nuent’s  Tungsten  to  load  data  into  Ver?ca  via  an  applier  wriSen  by  its  DBA.  BigDoor  has  a  new  sharded  MySQL  transac?onal  database  layer,  and  is  currently  in  beta  with  a  new  repor?ng  back-­‐end  using  a  batch  applier  built  by  Con?nuent  that  pushes  data  into  a  Ver?ca  data  warehouse.  Once  complete,  the  ETL  process  will  be  en?rely  automated  and  upda?ng  in  near  real-­‐?me,  removing  the  need  for  any  queries  to  be  run  against  the  sharded  MySQL  cluster.

Because  of  Ver?ca  and  Full  360,  BigDoor  can  report  on  its  KPIs  for  the  first  ?me,  Malek  said.  “Now  we  can  really  understand  how  much  we’re  affec?ng  end-­‐user  loyalty.  We’re  able  to  observe  how  many  ?mes  they  share  content,  measuring  virality.  We’re  able  to  see  how  many  transac?ons  users  complete  in  a  given  ?me  interval,  and  slice/dice  that  with  other  facts  to  measure  their  engagement,  loyalty,  and  revenue.  These  are  things  we  just  couldn’t  do  quickly  and  reliably  enough  before.”

Web/App Tier Transactional Tier

Replica Tier -  Backup -  Disaster Recovery -  Reporting

Visualization Tier

- ODBC

Web Log Parsing an independent

data stream

Transactions MySQL

Replication Batch Query

Results

Web/App Tier Transactional Tier

Replica Tier -  Backup -  Disaster Recovery

Analytic Warehouse

- Advance Analytics - Web Log Analysis - Reporting

Visualization Tier

Web Log Parsing an independent

data stream

Transactions MySQL

Replication Tungsten

Replication Batch Query

Results

Before AHer

About VerticaVertica, an HP Company, is the leading provider of next-generation analytics platforms enabling customers to monetize ALL of their data. The elasticity, scale, performance, and simplicity of the Vertica Analytics Platform are unparalleled in the industry, delivering 50x-1000x the performance of traditional solutions at 30% the total cost of ownership. With data warehouses and data marts ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to multiple petabytes, Vertica’s 600+ customers are rede"ning the speed of business and competitive advantage. Vertica powers some of the largest organizations and most innovative business models globally including Zynga, Groupon, Twitter, Verizon, Guess Inc., Admeld, Capital IQ, Mozilla, AT&T, and Comcast.

Vertica, An HP Company 8 Federal Street, Billerica, MA 01821 +1.978.600.1000 TEL +1.978.600.1001 FAX www.vertica.com© Vertica 2012. All rights reserved. All other company, brand and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Malek  also  said  that  since  BigDoor  implemented  Ver?ca,  he  has  no?ced  significant  performance  boosts  in  Tableau  compared  to  the  company’s  old  configura?on.

The Final Word

BigDoor  is  grateful  from  both  a  boSom-­‐line  and  personal  perspec?ve,  Malek  said.

“Ver?ca  and  Full  360  have  allowed  us  to  remove  a  lot  of  boSlenecks:  resources,  process  inefficiencies.  Now  there's  no  need  to  throw  bodies  at  the  ETL  process.  We’re  able  to  move  away  from  a  very  hands-­‐on  approach  to  data  warehousing  to  a  mostly  hands-­‐off,  low-­‐cost  solu?on…and  now  anyone  can  do  the  same,  quickly.

“Full  360  didn’t  have  that  big  vendor  feel  where  you  have  to  go  through  a  lot  of  bureaucracy  and  steps  to  get  what  you  need  to  have  done.  I  really  appreciate  that.”

Hill  said  Full  360  looks  forward  to  con?nuing  to  feature  Ver?ca  as  a  staple  in  its  BI  package  because  no  other  DBMS  can  match  its  performance.  

“I’ll  make  this  easy  for  people  to  understand,”  he  said.  “Ver?ca  is  the  most  exci?ng  thing  to  happen  to  business  intelligence  in  20  years—easily.  Everything  is  suddenly  faster.    You  can  do  queries  on  big  data  that  take  less  ?me  than  regular  queries  on  SQL  Server  or  Oracle.

“And  the  amount  of  development  ?me?  You  don’t  have  to  build  elaborate  star  and  snowflake  schemas  to  make  mul?dimensional—ROLAP—work  in  Ver?ca.  Most  of  the  ?me,  like  with  BigDoor,  we’re  not  even  building  star  schemas  for  them.  We’re  taking  their  opera?onal  schema  and  just  replica?ng  it  across  into  Ver?ca,  and  they’re  gevng  outstanding  performance.  You  don’t  have  to  throw  all  the  DBA  ?me  at  it  just  to  make  the  thing  work;  you  dump  the  data  in  and  go.”

Example  Tableau  Visualiza?on