Blueshift ONE combines the complexity of business planning, including commercial planning, sales forecasting and budgeting, along with supply chain planning, into an integrated cloud solution.
The integrated view of data gives Blueshift ONE customers a competitive edge with accurate reliable data that is shared across corporate functions during the business planning process. The integrated platform delivers a single consensus forecast across all functions, enabling ongoing strategic decision making.
The Risks of Analytic Performance for Cloud Applications
Every user of the Blueshift ONE platform enjoys the insights and reports commonly used for forecasting and budget planning. The expectation is that the reports will be accurate and responsive in order to support the variety of questions that commonly come up during the business planning process. A necessary consequence of a successful product is the increased strain on the analytic capabilities, driven by more data and users, and the effect this has on delivering a consistent and reliable experience to users.
Single Server Analytic Limitations
As the growth in data and customers continued to rise for the Blueshift ONE platform, the underlying Microsoft SQL Server implementation that powered the analytics began to show performance issues. Select power users and customers would periodically grumble about the query performance for different reports. The Blueshift team worked on a series of optimizations and scale-up configurations to SQL Server, only to recognize the customer growth challenges of a single node database would continue to be problematic.
A major factor of the degrading performance was the inability to shard data by customer, impacting aggregate views on a per customer basis. Each customer aggregation was delivered by inefficient table scans and difficult to configure query caches. This operations challenge led the Blueshift team to seek new solutions to their analytic challenges.
Distributed Data Processing for Faster Analytics
The Blueshift team evaluated a number of database solutions, including Cassandra, to address their analytic scalability issues. The team ultimately selected MemSQL due to the distributed data sharding support, support of ANSI SQL, and fast benchmark results.
The test results were able to prove MemSQL to be 100x faster than their existing SQL Server implementation. During additional stress tests of MemSQL, the data set was expanded by 100x to mimic substantial data growth and yet the analytics performed by MemSQL continued to blow past expectations.
Turning Analytics into a Competitive Advantage
The Blueshift ONE platform, now powered by MemSQL, is capable of delivering analytics on nearly 2 billion records with 60 measures in under 2 seconds. The fast performance gives the application a leg up on the competition as they grow their customer base and expand into new analytic capabilities that were previously not possible.
“MemSQL helps us “10X” our analytic capabilities, providing a much richer functionality going forward.”
Justin Stafford, CEO, Blueshift
Additional Database Resources for Cloud Application Vendors
Database Multi-Tenancy in the Cloud and Beyond
Delivering Scalable Self-Service Analytics
Seeking a Rescue from a Traditional RDBMS
Sponsored by MemSQL