Powering The Online Media & Entertainment Industry

MySQL – Powering The Online Media & Entertainment Industry

A MySQL Whitepaper January 2011

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Table of Content

Introduction ....................................................................................................3

1. Key Trends shaping the Media & Entertainment Industry .....................3 1.1 The Internet is Becoming The Dominant Media Platform.................3 1.2 The Dominant Internet Platform Will Be Wireless/Mobile.................4

2. Implications & Requirements....................................................................7 2.1 Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)................................................7 2.2 High Performance.................................................................................7 2.3 Support Expanding Customer Workload ...........................................7 2.4 High Availability....................................................................................7 2.5 Security of Customer Data...................................................................7 2.6 Time to Market ......................................................................................8 2.7 Ability To Experiment...........................................................................8

3. MySQL – A Great Choice to Power Web-Based Media & Entertainment Applications....................................................................................................8

3.1 A Database Battle-tested in Demanding Online Environments .......8 3.2 Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)..............................................10 3.3 A Commitment to High Performance................................................11 3.4 MySQL High Availability Solutions ...................................................14 3.5 Strong Data Protection.......................................................................15 3.6 MySQL Enterprise Edition: ................................................................15 3.7 Ease of Use and Administration: ......................................................20

4. Case Studies:............................................................................................20 4.1 Cashpoint ............................................................................................20 4.2 thePlatform..........................................................................................21

Conclusion....................................................................................................23

Additional Resources ..................................................................................23

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Introduction The Media & Entertainment industry experienced a spectacular transformation during the past decade. The once fairly well defined boundaries between the different types of media (i.e. Print, TV, Radio, Internet) have become increasingly blurred as we’ve gradually come to perform more and more of our daily activities “online.” As the term “Online Media” seems to become a pleonasm, we will examine the following questions in this document:

• What are some of the key trends shaping the evolution of the media & entertainment industry?

• What are their implications and what requirements do those trends place on

the infrastructure of information and entertainment services providers?

• How can you leverage Oracle’s MySQL technologies in order to win in the new world of media and entertainment?

1. Key Trends shaping the Media & Entertainment Industry A couple of overarching major trends are generating a myriad of consequences.

1.1 The Internet is Becoming The Dominant Media Platform Consider the following:

• There are now close to 2 billion Internet users, according to the Internet World Stats (1)

• Facebook counts over 500 million active users (2), with 50% of them logging on to the social network platform in any given day.

• YouTube serves over 1 Billion videos per day. (4)

• Twitter counts 160 million users (5), producing 90 million tweets every single day.

• According to Netcraft (6), there are now over 232 Million web sites.

• Digital TV is on the rise: The Digital Entertainment Group Estimates (7) that overall US DVD retail sales fell 13.5% to $5.4 billion during the first half of 2009. Digital sales and rental services like Amazon.com Inc, and Apple Inc’s iTunes rose 21% to $968 million.

(1) http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (2) http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (3) http://www.facebook.com/media?v=app_7146470109 (4) http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/youtube-over-one-billion-videos-served-per-day/ (5) http://twitter.com/about (6) http://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/ (7) http://www.marketwatch.com/story/studios-hurt-as-dvd-sales-fall-and-rentals-grow-2009-09-22

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• In its report “Internet trends” from June 2010 (8), Morgan Stanley underlines the current discrepancy between time and ad spend by media type, pointing to the significant opportunity to capture advertising dollars on the Internet moving forward as “advertising dollars ultimately follow eyeballs”.

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!• Users increasingly demand immediacy and have become addicted to real-

time information. Traditional media companies, therefore, face new competition from observant amateurs of various news and events, and may need to find creative ways to leverage the real-time Web to deliver added value to their customers.

1.2 The Dominant Internet Platform Will Be Wireless/Mobile

• ABI Research forecasts (9) over five billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2010. And never before has the ramp up time to reach 1 million units sold for devices such as the iPhone or the iPad been so fast (74 days for the iPhone and only 28 days for the iPad).

• In his article “Behold, the Next Media Titans: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon” (10) former Fortune Senior Writer and Wired Editor Fred Vogelstein makes the point that the switch from TV to the Internet that was slowly underway has been tremendously accelerated by the arrival of the iPhone and the iPad. He notes:

(8) http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/

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“Mobile search traffic at Google is up 50 percent in just the first six months of this year. And while a third of Facebook’s 500 million users access their accounts from a mobile device today, expect that number to double in the

next two years as Smartphone sales double. … The PC will always be a

lousy device to watch TV and movies on. The TV will always be a lousy

device for web surfing and e-mail. Smartphones and tablets, on the other

hand, are turning out to be good for all of them.”

• Morgan Stanley notes In its “Mobile Internet Report” from December 2009 (11) that: “mobile is ramping faster than desktop internet did and will be bigger than most think…Regarding pace of change, we believe most users will likely

connect to the internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years”. According to the company’s projections, the size of the mobile Web may actually dwarf the size of the wired Web by a factor of 10:

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• Another key point, in line with what Fred Vogelstein pointed out in its aforementioned article, is that the iPhone revolutionized how people use their mobile phone. Morgan Stanley outlines, also in its Mobile Internet Report (12), that indeed, Mobile Phone Usage is increasingly about Data, not Voice:

(9) http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1684-Worldwide+Mobile+Subscriptions+Forecast+to+Exceed+Five+Billion+by+4Q-2010 (10) http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/behold-the-next-media-titans/all/1 (11) http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/ (12) http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/

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The company concludes its report (13) mentioning that “Rapid Ramp of Mobile

Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some companies Will Likely

Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened”.

!• As most new smart phones include a GPS, it offers a tremendous opportunity

to content and services providers to deliver new applications leveraging geolocation. For example, Priceline.com lets its customers know about great hotels deals in the area they happen to be in. And Zipcars combines Google maps with its application to show customers where they can find the nearest available car. Innovative media companies have the opportunity to deliver new creative offerings and ads based on customers’ location at a given point in time.

Beyond moving online, our information and entertainment consumption is now increasingly done on the move thanks a new generation of mobile devices; and the leading Web properties such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter are becoming interfaces through which people create, discover, consume and purchase media. What are the implications of those trends in terms of IT systems? What requirements do they place on the infrastructure of information & entertainment services providers? We will examine those in the next section. (13) http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/

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2. Implications & Requirements !

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2.1 Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Media organizations have been, and still are, under tremendous competitive pressure as the industry went through a complete metamorphosis, with new entrants changing the rules of the game. Reducing the cost of their IT infrastructure is high on the agenda of media companies, and a large number of them are turning towards open source software and commodity hardware, the infrastructure implemented by most successful online media and Web 2.0 businesses.

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2.2 High Performance

Media organizations know that the competition is simply a mouse click (or screen touch) away, and rapid responses to customer inquiries and activities are, therefore, paramount. The database serving these types of applications needs to provide extreme performance for both read (simple and complex) and write operations. Another factor of performance is that this same type of extreme performance must be exhibited no matter the workload (e.g. thousands of current connections) or data volume (GB to multi-TB).

2.3 Support Expanding Customer Workload

Successful online media & entertainment organizations share a common trait – they rarely thought they would grow as fast as they did. They need to be able to quickly adapt to a growing and expanding customer workload, without experiencing any interruption in customer service.

2.4 High Availability

Online media applications must typically be available 24/7. Downtime can be extremely detrimental to customer loyalty and, potentially, very costly. They need their database platform to exhibit high code quality, fault tolerance, rapid restart & restore, dynamic adaptation to increasing workload as well as simple upgrades and easy maintenance operations.

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2.5 Security of Customer Data

Protecting the data assets of a business is the number one job of a database and those who manage it. In addition to standard security practices, media & entertainment organizations collecting information about their users via the Internet face important data protection and security challenges. To protect and secure the information in their databases, they need strong security features.

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2.6 Time to Market

Time to market for new or enhanced applications is likely going to be increasingly important to serve a large base of customers online and on the move.

Time to market for Web-based applications is largely impacted by the underlying database powering them. The ease of use & administration of the database is therefore paramount to enable fast time to market.

2.7 Ability to Experiment Innovative media companies must be able to experiment and constantly deliver new online applications (testing out new ways to serve news, new games…etc) quickly and at low cost to beat the competition. Most of those applications may not be successful but as long as the experimentation cost is low then they can afford the risk, which is why it is essential to have a low TCO database platform. Moreover, the database needs to be open and allow customizations so the capabilities and functions can as closely as possible match the requirements of groundbreaking businesses. Once launched, some of those applications can however truly become an overnight success, and will be required to fail over and scale transparently without any disruption in service to the consumer. Indeed, as media sites increasingly connect to or deliver applications via platforms such as Facebook, the traffic increase they face if those are successful can be pretty dramatic.

Let’s now try to better understand why MySQL has become the default choice for Web based application, and how the world’s most popular open source database addresses the requirements we just described.

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3. MySQL – A Great Choice to Power Web-Based Media & Entertainment Applications !

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3.1 A Database Battle-tested in Demanding Online Environments !MySQL is the world's most popular open source database, with over 100 million copies of its software downloaded or distributed throughout its history. With its superior speed, reliability, and ease of use, MySQL has become the preferred choice for Web, Web 2.0, SaaS, ISV, Telecom companies and forward-thinking corporate IT managers because it eliminates the major problems associated with downtime, maintenance and administration for modern, online applications.

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MySQL is a key part of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), the fast-growing open source enterprise software stack. More and more companies are using LAMP as an alternative to expensive proprietary software stacks because of its lower cost and freedom from platform lock-in. !

MySQL powers more Web-based applications than any other database in the world including such high profile Web sites as: Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, YouTube & Wikipedia, as well as thousands of corporate online applications, MySQL powers leading Media & Entertainment applications delivered by BBC News, Associated Press, Hachette Filipacchi Media, IDG, Cashpoint, Skyblog, The Weather Channel and many more. New media companies tend to select MySQL by default, and traditional media companies have come to recognize and implement open source software and MySQL as enabling technologies allowing them to adapt to the changing environment we’ve described in Section 1 of this whitepaper. Here are a few examples of Media & Entertainment applications powered by MySQL:

• Digital News (New York Times, BBC, Aftonbladet) • Online Videos (You Tube, Vimeo, Netflix, the Platform) • Online Photos (Flickr, Fotolog) • Gaming (Zynga, Cashpoint, Sulake) • RSS Feeds (Feedburner, Feedster) • Social Networking (Facebook, Skyblog, Twitter, LinkedIn) • Blogs (WordPress) • Collaboration, Forums (Phorum) • Wikis (Wikipedia) • Classified Ads (Craigslist, Gumtree) • Directories (Eniro, Seat Pagine Gialle) • Advertising Networks (Gorilla Nation)

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3.2 Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

By migrating current database-driven applications to MySQL, or using MySQL for new development projects, corporations are realizing cost savings that many times stretch into seven figures. Accomplished through the use of the MySQL database and scale-out architectures that utilize low-cost commodity hardware, corporations are finding that they can achieve amazing levels of scalability and performance, while significantly lowering their TCO. In addition, the reliability and easy maintainability of MySQL means that database administrators don't waste time troubleshooting performance or downtime issues, but instead can concentrate on making a positive impact on higher level tasks that involve the business side of data. !

Below is a chart comparing the 3 year TCO of MySQL Enterprise Editon vs. Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

- Term: 3 Years - Hardware: Intel x86 - Users: Unlimited (web) - Servers: 4 - MySQL: MySQL Enterprise Edition - CPUs/Server: 4 - Microsoft: SQL Server Enterprise Edition

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Microsoft SQL Server vs. MySQL: 3 Year Database TCO The table below presents a simple comparison of licensing costs between MySQL Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Pricing is based on publicly available list price information: Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx MySQL Enterprise Edition: http://www.mysql.com/products/ Hardware Configuration: - Web application (Unlimited Users) - Windows - Intel x86 - Servers: 4 - CPUs/Server: 4 - Cores/CPU: 4

Microsoft SQL Server

Enterprise Edition License + 3 Year Support

MySQL Enterprise Edition 3 Year Subscription

License List Price $27,495/CPU N/A

Support List Price 25% of List Price N/A

Subscription List Price N/A $5,000/Server/Year

Total License $439,920 N/A

Total Support (3 Years) $329,940 N/A

Total Subscription (3 Years)

$60,000

Total (3 Years)

$769,860 $60,000

Total Savings ($) $709,860

Total Savings (%) 92%

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3.3 A Commitment to High Performance

One of MySQL’s hallmarks is exceptional performance, which is why so many Web-based businesses use MySQL. They know the competition is just a mouse-click/screen-touch away and, therefore, need to ensure their database driven systems are always performing at top-notch speed. MySQL utilizes a number of unique and industry-standard features to deliver fast performance to online Media & Entertainment applications. These include very efficient connection handling, smart memory utilization, performance increases that come from using the right storage engine, and a number of other features. In addition, MySQL 5.5 includes InnoDB as default storage engine and delivers significant performance and scalability improvements.

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InnoDB Default Storage Engine in MySQL 5.5 Oracle’s InnoDB is the mostly widely used storage engine for Web/Web 2.0, eCommerce, Financial Systems, Health Care, Retail and Media & Entertainment applications built on MySQL, and for good reason; InnoDB provides highly efficient ACID compliant transactional capabilities and includes unique architectural elements that assure high performance and scalability. Further, InnoDB is structurally designed to handle transactional applications that require crash recovery, referential integrity, high levels of user concurrency and SLA exceeding response times. One of the most notable enhancements in MySQL 5.5 is that InnoDB is now the default storage engine for newly created tables. While MyISAM and the other table types are still readily available users can now create applications built on InnoDB without configuration setting changes. For MySQL 5.5 InnoDB has been re-architected so that it can be optimized to take full advantage of modern hardware and operating system resources and efficiencies. In recent benchmarks presented in September at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, using the MySQL 5.5 release candidate version compared to MySQL 5.1, results demonstrated marked performance improvements:

• On Windows: up to 1,500 percent performance gains for Read/Write operations, and up to 500 percent gain for Read Only(1).

• On Linux: up to 360 percent performance gain in Read/Write operations and up to 200 percent improvement in Read Only(2).

Rapid Connection Handling

MySQL offers a specialized internal thread/connection cache that very quickly establishes incoming new connections and efficiently terminates existing connections upon request. The MySQL connection pool always has new threads at the ready to service new customer requests so no overhead is wasted on building new connections from scratch. This means that connecting to and disconnecting from the MySQL Database are non-events.

Utilizing the Power of Memory

MySQL exploits the advances in and the abundant supply of memory in today’s modern servers to deliver exceptional database performance. Of course, MySQL utilizes industry-standard data and index caches to keep often-referenced information in memory for fast access, but also offers specific additional features: First, MySQL offers main memory tables for extremely fast response times. Both the memory and MySQL Cluster storage engine provide the option to use main memory tables as part of a database schema. Main memory tables deliver higher speed than standard disk tables, even when the caches utilized by disk tables are “warm.” In addition to main memory tables, MySQL provides a unique query cache that is especially designed for modern Web-based applications that service repetitive queries asking for the same information. The MySQL query cache stores not only the query sent from a client application but the computed result set as well. Note this is radically different than a result set being reconstructed from raw data already in memory – the result set is not recomputed. It’s easy to see why this unique type of

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cache can prove to be an invaluable aid to Web applications that must constantly service the same questions over and over again. !

Performance via Different Storage Engines A unique feature of MySQL is the "pluggable storage engine architecture”. The MySQL pluggable storage engine architecture allows a database professional to select a specialized storage engine for a particular application requirement while being completely shielded from the need to develop or manage any specific application code.

Simply switching storage engines in the MySQL Database can deliver dramatic increases in performance – all without having to change one line of code in an online application. Each of the MySQL storage engines contains various characteristics that help service distinctive needs in an always-on system. For example, for online applications needing extreme insert/data load performance, MySQL’s Archive storage engine offers triple-digit speed increases over other storage engines when it comes to insert speed. In addition to standard performance increases that can be made with just a single switch to a different storage engine, MySQL’s storage engines also offer tremendous flexibility in how data can be used and manipulated. The CSV storage engine, for example, allows flat-file data to be referenced with SQL via the MySQL interface, but it also allows for the immediate introduction of data to a MySQL database no matter how large the data file is by simply renaming the operating system file name to the table file name used by the database. Such external-file handling capabilities are available in no other database on the market.

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Other Performance-Related MySQL Features

MySQL contains many other performance-related features that help web-based applications perform at a rate that modern media & entertainment businesses demand. For example, data partitioning is available for applications needing to horizontally separate data in a table and any associated indexes. The MySQL optimizer is smart enough to scan only the partitions needed to satisfy an end-user query, which can drastically reduce overall response times. Full support for range, hash, list, and composite/sub partitioning is available across multiple columns as well as numeric and character based data types. Finally, MySQL contains all the right utilities and functions that help architects of Web based database systems design applications that yield very high rates of performance. Parallel load utilities, strong indexing support (clustered, full-text, hash, spatial, b-tree), unlimited row-level locking coupled with MVCC (which results in little, if any lock contention issues), and much more make MySQL a very good option for those wanting a high-performance database. !

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3.4 MySQL High Availability Solutions Databases are at the center of media & entertainment applications and store an organization’s most valuable assets including customer information, product information, order information and historical data. Plus, organizations rely on databases to run their business-critical applications. Hours or even minutes of downtime often result in significant amounts of lost revenue and unsatisfied customers. Therefore, making database applications highly available is a top priority for organizations in general, and for media & entertainment ones in particular considering the “always on” nature of their business. MySQL provides a number of options to make your database infrastructure highly available. Selecting which high availability solution is right for you will largely depend on how many “nines” of availability you require and the type of application you are deploying.

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MySQL Replication Using MySQL replication, organizations can cost-effectively deliver a high availability solution. Master/slave replication enables operations to manually fail-over to another server in the event of a hardware or software problem. In addition, with MySQL replication, organizations can incrementally scale out their infrastructure to accommodate exponentially growing capacity demands. MySQL Replication ships out of the box and is used by some of the world’s most highly trafficked Web sites including YouTube, Yahoo!, flickr, Wikipedia and Craigslist. In MySQL 5.5, new semi-synchronous replication and replication Heart Beat improve the reliability of data and the speed of failover for continuous application availability.

MySQL Cluster MySQL Cluster is a product designed for applications demanding real-time performance and 99.999% availability. It features a shared-nothing distributed architecture with no single point of failure to ensure five 9s availability, allowing you to meet your most demanding mission-critical application requirements. Its real-time design delivers consistent millisecond response latency with the ability to service tens of thousands of transactions per second. Support for in-memory and disk-based data, automatic data partitioning with load balancing, and the ability to add nodes to a running cluster with zero downtime enables almost unlimited database scalability to handle your most unpredictable workloads. The benefits of MySQL Cluster have been realized in highly demanding data management environments in the web and telecommunications sectors by companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Shopatron.

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3.5 Strong Data Protection

Because guarding the data assets of corporations is the number one job of database professionals, MySQL offers exceptional security features that ensure absolute data protection. In terms of database authentication, MySQL provides powerful mechanisms for ensuring only authorized users have entry to the database, with the ability to block users down to the client machine level being possible. SSH and SSL support are also provided to ensure safe and secure connections. A granular object privilege framework is present so that users only see the data they should, and powerful data encryption and decryption functions ensure that sensitive data is protected from unauthorized viewing. Finally, backup and recovery utilities provided through MySQL Enterprise Edition and third-party software vendors allow for complete logical and physical backup as well as full and point-in-time recovery.

3.6 MySQL Enterprise Edition: MySQL Enterprise Edition reduces the risk, cost and time required in developing, deploying and managing business-critical MySQL applications.

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The MySQL Enterprise subscription is the only comprehensive offering of production support, monitoring tools and MySQL database software to deliver optimal performance, reliability, security, and uptime. In addition to the MySQL Database, MySQL Enterprise includes:

• The MySQL Enterprise Monitor:

The MySQL Enterprise Monitor provides at-a-glance views of the health of your MySQL databases. It continuously monitors your MySQL servers and alerts you to potential problems before they impact your system. It’s like having a “virtual DBA” assistant at your side to recommend best practices and eliminate security vulnerabilities, improve replication, and optimize performance. As a result, DBAs and system administrators can manage more servers in less time.

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"The MySQL Enterprise Monitor is an absolute must for any DBA who takes his

work seriously."

Adrian Baumann, System Specialist, Federal Office of Information Technology and Telecommunications

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MySQL Replication Monitor

The MySQL Replication Monitor provides real-time replication health and status checks on master/slave performance and latency issues. MySQL Advisors The MySQL Enterprise Monitor includes more than 140 MySQL advisor rules that monitor more than 600 MySQL and operating system specific variables to help you automatically enforce MySQL recommended database best practices. They deliver expert advice that come straight from the database professionals who build the MySQL database. The advisors provide tailored step-by-step instructions to solve specific problems. The MySQL Enterprise Monitor includes the following:

• Upgrade Advisor - Monitors and advises you on using the most up-to-date version of MySQL.

• Administration Advisor - Enforces DBA best practices to prevent costly outages.

• Security Advisor - Minimizes exposure to security vulnerabilities. • Replication Advisor - Recommends solutions for replication setup and

performance improvements. • Schema Advisor - Assists in uncovering database design issues that reduce

performance. • Performance Advisor - Recommends changes to boost database

performance. • Memory Usage Advisor - Monitors dynamic memory-related server metrics

and recommends configuration changes to improve performance. • Custom Advisor - Enables you to create custom best practice rules tailored to

your needs. MySQL Query Analyzer

The MySQL Query Analyzer helps developers and DBAs improve application performance by monitoring queries and accurately pinpointing SQL code that is causing a slow down. With the new MySQL Connector Plug-ins, performance of Java and Microsoft .NET applications can be optimized more efficiently by communicating directly with the MySQL Query Analyzer. Queries are presented in an aggregated view across all MySQL servers so DBAs and developers can filter for specific query problems and analyze their most expensive code. With the MySQL Query Analyzer, DBAs can improve the SQL code during active development and continuously monitor and tune the queries in production.

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"The MySQL Query Analyzer gives us a better level of visibility into our

database performance that we have never had before. Not only does it save us

both time and resources, it allows us to be far better prepared when these

applications go live, understanding exactly the demands that will be placed on the system."

Phil Hildebrand, Database Manager, thePlatform, a subsidiary of Comcast interactive Media

• MySQL Workbench MySQL Workbench is a unified visual tool that enables developers, DBAs, and data architects to design, develop and administer MySQL servers. MySQL Workbench provides advanced data modeling, a flexible SQL editor, and comprehensive administrative tools.

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MySQL Workbench allows you to:

• Design: MySQL Workbench includes everything a data modeler needs for creating complex ER models, forward and reverse engineering, and also delivers key features for performing difficult change management and documentation tasks that normally require much time and effort.

• Develop: MySQL Workbench delivers visual tools for creating, executing, and optimizing SQL queries. The SQL Editor provides color syntax highlighting, reuse of SQL snippets, and execution history of SQL. The Database Connections Panel enables developers to easily manage database connections. The Object Browser provides instant access to database schema and objects.

• Administer: MySQL Workbench provides a visual console to easily

administer MySQL environments and gain better visibility into databases. Developers and DBAs can use the visual tools for configuring servers, administering users, and viewing database health.

• MySQL Enterprise Backup MySQL Enterprise Backup performs online “Hot” backups of your MySQL databases. You get a consistent backup copy of your database to recover your data to a precise point in time. In addition, MySQL Enterprise Backup supports creating compressed backup files, and performing backups of subsets of InnoDB tables. Compression typically reduces backup size up to 90% when compared with the size of actual database files, helping to reduce storage costs. In conjunction with the MySQL binlog, users can perform point in time recovery.

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• Oracle Premier Support:

MySQL Enterprise Edition provides 24x7x365 access to Oracle’s MySQL Support team, which is staffed by seasoned database experts ready to help with the most complex technical issues. Oracle’s Premier support provides you with: • 24x7x365 phone and online support • Rapid diagnosis and solution to complex issues • Unlimited incidents • Emergency hot fix builds!• Access to Oracle’s MySQL Knowledge Base!• Consultative support services

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3.7 Ease of Use and Administration: Ease of use has been a design goal for MySQL since its inception. MySQL offers exceptional quick-start capability with the average time from software download to installation completion being less than fifteen minutes. Once installed, self-management features like automatic space expansion, auto-restart, and dynamic configuration changes take much of the burden off already overworked database administrators. The visual database design, development, administration and monitoring tools delivered within MySQL Enterprise Edition and presented earlier in this document further enhance MySQL’s ease of use and administration. MySQL’s ease of use helps media & entertainment companies to quickly and cost-effectively deliver new and enhanced web based applications.

4. Case Studies:

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4.1 Cashpoint Cashpoint is a betting and gaming enterprise founded in 1996 in Austria and is the market leader in several European countries including Germany and Austria. Cashpoint has an extensive network of betting offices, more than 3,000 betting terminals, and an online betting platform.

Business Challenge The Sybase database that was originally deployed at Cashpoint no longer met their ever-increasing data management requirements. The stability, reliability, and performance did not allow Cashpoint to achieve the required level of service availability. Cashpoint searched for a stable and low administration database environment to optimize their performance levels, maintenance times, and availability demands.

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The MySQL Solution Today, Cashpoint utilizes both MySQL Enterprise Edition and MySQL Cluster for managing customer, Web, and results data with the required levels of high availability. The database cluster consists of four data and SQL nodes connected by the Dolphin Interconnect, in addition to two replication and standby nodes. Furthermore, the replication mechanisms of MySQL particularly met Cashpoint's requirements for high availability and scalability. The cost/performance ratio of the overall solution was the decisive factor in switching to a MySQL-based solution. MySQL was able to comprehensively meet all the specifications. Besides annual license savings of ! 250,000, Cashpoint have also reduced server costs by ! 150,000 and labor costs by ! 90,000. Additionally, using MySQL technologies resulted in considerable performance and scalability improvements. Thanks to the replication mechanisms, Cashpoint can eliminate a range of separate services, which minimizes administrative overhead. In addition, the ability to perform maintenance operations to the database on-line, without impacting running operations and interrupting services has also reduced TCO. Cashpoint makes extensive use of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor to monitor its MySQL databases. Thanks to this tool, database administrators have been able to obtain valuable information on the health of both individual database servers and their overall database environment. The MySQL Query Analyzer has also been used to optimize database queries, therefore delivering even higher levels of performance.

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4.2 thePlatform

thePlatform is a leading, fast-growing video management and publishing company for broadband, mobile and TV. Established in 2000, thePlatform’s Media Publishing System™(MPS) enables media companies like Time Warner Cable to manage, monetize and syndicate their billions of video views more effectively. Feeling confident that the MPS solution can reliably deliver and manage media content, thePlatform's customers can then focus more on business-critical applications and revenue-generating activities such as advertisement. Since its debut, thePlatform quickly grew revenue, as well as momentum, in the media sector, and has successfully gained well-known customers, including Comcast, NBC-Universal, Associated Press, BBC Global News, HIT Entertainment and CNBC. For its best-in-class technology and top tier customer base, Comcast Interactive Media acquired thePlatform in 2006, which now operates as a stand-alone subsidiary.

The MySQL Solution thePlatform selected MySQL for the following reasons: • Reputation: MySQL is renowned as a database to support mission-critical

applications for large websites such as Google and Facebook.

• High Performance: thePlatform had done extensive performance tests on

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MySQL to make sure that MySQL could support their customers’ traffic load. In the benchmark tests, MySQL with the InnoDB storage engine processed 1,500 transactions/second under normal load, and as high as 10,000 transactions/second during peak performance, with no database locking issues. Both numbers exceeded thePlatform’s requirements for database performance.

• Low TCO: thePlatform runs its database applications on 4-CPU, dual-core Intel machines. Since the MySQL Enterprise Edition subscription is priced on a per server basis, rather than by the number of cores or CPUs, thePlatform found it very cost-effective in terms of price/ performance.

MySQL Query Analyzer thePlatform makes extensive use of the MySQL Query Analyzer included in the MySQL Enterprise Edition, which provides a consolidated view of query activity and execution statistics across all MySQL servers. The company describes the MySQL Query Analyzer as “a great tool for trouble shooting” and has successfully improved performance by orders of magnitude. In one case where thePlatform was testing the new version of a custom service API, the DBA team noticed that the response times kept increasing during the performance tests but had difficulties identifying the associated query. After obtaining the MySQL Query Analyzer, thePlatform quickly found the queries that were causing performance issues. Once the problematic query was identified, thePlatform immediately recognized a missing index. By simply adding back this missing index, the query time was decreased from 70 seconds to 3 seconds, effectively a 23x performance improvement. This huge performance gain, which would have required several days of effort, only took thePlatform a few minutes to achieve with the MySQL Query Analyzer. thePlatform can now identify and fix critical performance issues before deploying new code into production, and solve problems before they're noticed by customers. Beyond the Query Analyzer, thePlatform also heavily relies on the MySQL Enterprise Monitor replication and other MySQL best practices DBA advisors.

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Conclusion In this whitepaper we’ve reviewed how the Internet, and more precisely the mobile Internet, is becoming the dominant media platform worldwide, the requirements this evolution creates for media & entertainment companies with respect to their infrastructure, and how MySQL is addressing them. As during previous shifts in the industry, the companies best prepared to take advantage of the changes in the environment will win, and the others may not all survive. Choosing MySQL for their new web based applications can help media & entertainment organizations to be more agile, and to quickly and cost-effectively deliver new services highly scalable and highly available.

Additional Resources MySQL Media & Entertainment Customer References http://www.mysql.com/customers/industry/?id=72 MySQL Whitepapers http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/ MySQL Webinars: Live: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/index.html On Demand: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/ MySQL Enterprise Edition Trial: http://www.mysql.com/trials/ To contact an Oracle MySQL Representative: http://www.mysql.com/about/contact/

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