creative content of ads themselves, when they
were run, what Websites they were placed on,
and how consumers responded to them. Most
of LinkShare’s advertisers want to be able to
analyze three to five years of historical data
to help them understand the effectiveness of
different internet offers and the performance
of particular ads on particular sites.
“We’re talking about huge volumes of
historical information on what pieces of
creative were put up on the network, what
offers got made, which advertisers had
relationships with what publishers, which
of those things generated customer interest
in the form of an impression or click, which
of those clicks translated into a transaction,
and how much did those transactions
make?” says Levine. “Our advertisers and
publishers want the ability to analyze this
massive amount of data in real time. And
for us, the amount of data and the number
of people performing analysis will only
continue to grow.”
As a result of that growth, LinkShare
was continuously challenged to deliver 100
percent uptime as it grew its existing clustered database system. At
the same time, the system also needed to accommodate increasing
analytic and reporting demands from the business. LinkShare
needed increased performance to meet its clients’ ever-increasing
requirements for instant access to data and trends. Those factors led
LinkShare
Location: New York, New York
Employees: 230
Oracle products: Oracle Database, Sun Oracle
Database Machine, Oracle Exadata, Oracle
E-Business Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition 11g
SNAPSHOTS
Amtrak
Headquarters: Washington DC
Revenue: Approximately $2.35 billion
(F Y 2009)
Employees: Approximately 22,000
Customers served: 27. 2 million passengers in
FY 2009
Oracle products: Oracle Database 11g, Oracle
Database Machine, Oracle Exadata
TUI Netherlands
Location: Rijswijk, the Netherlands
Annual revenue: € 1. 3 billion
Employees: More than 2,500
Oracle products: Oracle Database, Oracle Real
Application Clusters, Sun Oracle Database
Machine, Oracle Exadata
Levine and his team to switch to Oracle and
to deploy their enterprise data warehouse
with Oracle Exadata.
“One of the attributes of Oracle Exadata
that was really important to us was the fact
that it’s very fault tolerant,” says Levine. “It’s
fault tolerant in the way that the system
degrades, rather than shuts down, for most
kinds of faults that we see in production. We
saw very few other systems that were able to
do that, especially taking into account price
and how much space and power it took to
keep the solutions running.”
Another business benefit of selecting
Oracle Exadata for LinkShare is that it is based
on Oracle Database software and Linux.
“Managing Oracle Exadata is quite similar
to any other Oracle databases, so I don’t
have to have two database management
teams and two systems management
teams,” says Levine. “It’s very attractive from
an operational perspective. We can better
manage our operations teams’ workloads, so
we can provide our customers better service
without increasing our labor costs.”
LAYING DOWN THE RAILS FOR A MORE EFFICIENT AND
RESPONSIVE BUSINESS
It takes powerful engines and many miles of track to run a railroad,
but doing it well also requires timely and accurate business
information. And while Amtrak—America’s
only high-speed and intercity passenger
railroad—has plenty of rolling stock and
track, its management needs more-
complete and -timely information to make
the train operations safer, greener, and more
competitive, and the organization more
responsive to customer needs.
Over the years, Amtrak had developed
different data marts, but it never had a
formal enterprise data warehouse. In 2009,
Amtrak decided to build an enterprise
data warehouse that would include data
from finance, marketing, and operations,
among other departments. An enterprise
data warehouse would allow Amtrak
management to be more proactive,
especially in areas such as equipment
failures and maintenance.
Specifically, the organization wanted a
leading-edge platform that could deliver
fast performance. As a result, it selected the
Oracle Database Machine.
DAVID DEAL
The idea of a database appliance was part of the appeal of the Oracle Database Machine, says Steve Trus,
Amtrak’s senior director of enterprise services, pictured with Jennifer Kao, manager, enterprise data warehouse.
