Jack, Josh and Gerry all had a similar problem — they were struggling with legacy single-node databases that could no longer keep up with the demands of their business.
Although each developer’s company serves a different industry, they all have something in common: their applications qualify as data intensive, meaning they need to offer fast, interactive experiences for thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of users on-demand, everywhere and in real time.
Most organizations start with first-generation, open-source single-node databases (like MySQL, PostgreSQL or their commercial variants) to power their SaaS applications — quickly running into several challenges:
- Bottlenecks with ingesting, processing and analyzing the fast-moving streaming data necessary to power modern, interactive SaaS applications
- Lagging query performance as data or concurrency demands grow
- Built on single-node architectures and struggles to scale as your business or users grow
- Offers little-to-no analytical capabilities to drive fast, interactive user experiences.
How did Jack, Josh and Gerry overcome these obstacles to effectively and efficiently supercharge their SaaS apps? As highlighted in our latest eBook, “A 5-Step Guide to Supercharging Your SaaS Apps,” it starts with finding the right database.
Building the World’s Fastest Website Analytics Platform
Jack Ellis, CTO and co-founder of Fathom Analytics had hit a wall, maxing out MySQL. Jack is on a mission to build the world’s fastest website analytics platform with Fathom but his queries were taking too long to process for the website analytics platform. Jack needed a database that could keep up with growing query volumes — without sacrificing speed. His list of requirements included everything from ridiculously fast speeds to infinite scalability, high availability and easy-to-digest documentation.
“For me, I want the whole package. I like speed, but I also want to feel good about what I’m using,” Jack writes. Even more, he wanted to know that companies larger than Fathom were using the database to handle their data — giving his company an aspirational look at the possibilities.
One of the key selling points for Fathom was that they didn’t have to rewrite any queries — thanks to SingleStore’s MySQL wire protocol compatibility, which saved their developers weeks of work.
Fathom was also able to replace Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) as their application cache, and is using SingleStoreDB for all their caching needs, thereby simplifying their architecture and significantly driving down costs.
With customers like Comcast, Akamai and Tier-1 U.S. banks, Jack felt confident in using SingleStoreDB. The result? Fathom eliminated MySQL, Redis and DynamoDB from their data architecture, and saw a 1,000x improvement in query performance, and 60% reduction in database TCO.
And as Jack put it: “We moved all of our analytics data to the database of our dreams.”
Get the full story: Fathom Analytics
The Need for Real Time, Every Time
IEX Cloud is a data infrastructure and delivery platform for financial and alternative data sets that connects developers and financial data creators. For co-founder and Head of Technology Josh Blackburn, IEX Cloud’s existing MySQL data architecture wasn’t meeting query or scale requirements. The company needed a way to maximize performance and run real-time analytics on more than 400,000 events per second.
Per Josh, “Amazon Redshift or Snowflake are great for storing large amounts of historical data and doing analytics. But neither database is going to meet a real-time service level agreement (SLA) for web developers, websites, or financial data. We want a delivery platform that scales to any number of users with real-time use cases, and any amount of data under the hood.”
For IEX Cloud, choosing SingleStoreDB meant a few things: With ultra-fast ingest, super low latency queries, high concurrency and the ability to get started fast, it offered powerful functionality for an innovative financial organization. They were able to get up and running quickly because of its MySQL wire protocol. They didn’t face months of migration time, since all tools, documentation and support are readily available. And after only two years on SingleStoreDB, IEX Cloud added 150,000 users in 120 countries — representing 20 million unique users downstream.
Today, IEX Cloud processes over 2.5B API requests daily with an 8ms average response time — and a 10-15x increase in speed over their previous database.
The Desire for Speed, Scale and Performance
With more than 15.1 million participants and 4.8 billion transactions analyzed, fintech company dailyVest needed an underlying data architecture built with speed and scale to power their retirement planning and performance platform — something their AzureSQL engine wasn’t accomplishing.
“We were also seeing some performance degradation in Azure SQL,” said Gerry Morgan, lead developer at dailyVest. “Not so much that our customers would have noticed, but we noticed there was some drop off in speed in our ingestion of data.”
Data volumes are growing at 36% a year, fueled by billions of transactions And in a highly competitive fintech space, every second counts. Those are seconds dailyVest got back with SingleStoreDB, executing stored procedures three times faster than Azure SQL — while reducing copy-and-restore operations from one hour to four minutes for a 90% improvement.
The performance improvements dailyVest saw with Singlestore Helios were substantial compared to Azure SQL, ranging from 12.4% to an incredible 95% depending on the type of operation. The dailyVest team was able to analyze more on the backend than before, all while achieving a 35% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).
Power Your SaaS Apps With SingleStoreDB
To read more about how Jack, Josh and Gerry — and more than 100 leading SaaS players and Tier-1 enterprises — power their modern, data-intensive applications with SingleStoreDB, download our latest eBook, “A 5-Step Guide to Supercharging Your SaaS Apps.”
