Oracle Magazine - September/October 2010

“We needed much more
power in our OLTP
systems. Oracle Exadata
has given us that power.”

—Eli Lysen, CIO, TUI Nederland NV

Amtrak recently rolled out its first Oracle Exadata–based solution, a dashboard for its board of directors that covers nine key performance indicators, including cost recovery ratio, ridership, on-time performance, and safety. It draws on five subject areas and seven large fact tables and provides a 40-second response time scanning 150 million rows of data using the Oracle Database Machine.

“It has very good performance, and we’re very pleased with it,” says Jennifer Kao, manager, enterprise data warehouse, at Amtrak.

In addition to the performance benefits associated with Oracle Exadata, the fact that Amtrak didn’t have to spend time or money integrating different components was very appealing.

“We really liked the idea of the database appliance and the
integrated combination of hardware and software,” says Steve
Trus, senior director of enterprise services at Amtrak. “That way, we
don’t have to worry about upgrading it, or hardware and software
mismatches. It’s much easier.”
Amtrak’s team was also attracted to the idea of being able to
leverage the existing skill sets of its current DBAs and developers. In
addition, Amtrak was already running several Oracle technology–
based transactional systems, so its datacenter staff and processes
were well suited to support the new Oracle Exadata technology.

With Oracle Exadata, the learning curve is reduced to a minimum. Because Amtrak has been using an Oracle solution, there have been almost no surprises and the deployment and development effort has been a lot smoother. And Oracle Exadata has significantly reduced the amount of DBA effort required in terms of performance tuning, since building lots of indexes and aggregate tables is unnecessary.

Amtrak already has another three subject areas, including ticket issuance, in the testing phase, with plans to add nine others to the Oracle Exadata–based enterprise data warehouse in the future. By the end of 2011, Kao expects that data warehouse will hold up to 3 terabytes of data and support more than 500 concurrent business intelligence users throughout Amtrak.

of all TUI’s “inventory” of
packages and products can
change hourly or daily depending
on fuel prices and other
variables. Compounding these
challenges is the fact that TUI
needs to deliver results night and day, seven days a week, so system
performance and availability are critical.

“The speed of our systems is very crucial to our business because
availability of individual package components changes so quickly,”
says Eli Lysen, CIO, TUI Nederland NV. “If we have one component
sell out, such as a flight seat, it can impact all the other components
of the package as well as all the other packages. Calculations and
availability are the most important things in the travel industry.”
As important as timely calculations are, at one point in 2009 TUI
found itself several days behind on calculations it needed to complete.

“We ended up in a position where our systems couldn’t calculate
the correct availability in time for our customers,” says Lysen. “That
was a big reason for our purchase of Oracle Exadata. We needed
much more power in our OLTP systems. Oracle Exadata has given us
that power, and our calculations department is running many more
calculations than it ever has in the past.”
Oracle Exadata has been very reliable for TUI. “With our old
system we had to check it each hour to keep it running stable,” says
Lysen. “Now, with Oracle Exadata, we have a stable system. We don’t
have to check it all the time. It just works.”

SCALING TO MILLIONS OF CALCULATIONS

In addition to its data warehousing capabilities, Oracle Exadata’s extreme performance and scalability when handling OLTP workloads has had a big impact on one company for whom vacations are all business—big business. In fact, TUI Netherlands, a division of TUI Travel PLC, is the largest tour operator in the Netherlands, with more than 1 million customers. The company owns more than 200 travel agencies and even has its own airline, but one thing TUI didn’t have was the time to recalculate the prices of hundreds of thousands of vacation packages when the underlying components or source prices changed.

TUI’s travel agents, as well as direct internet customers, design and price holidays from a variety of package components, including air travel, hotel accommodations, and activities. Pricing, availability, dates, and times can change second by second, and overall pricing

S TAYING COMPE TI TIVE WITH THE RIGHT INFORMATION

Staying competitive these days requires a relevant strategy, great operations, and the right types of information to make the correct business decisions.

Oracle Exadata offers organizations a different way to make those decisions. It can handle the toughest data warehousing and OLTP requirements while simultaneously making it easier than ever before to truly understand and analyze the wide range of data that organizations are collecting. Whether it’s helping to generate internet marketing revenue, making the trains run on time, or ensuring that travelers get the best deal on their vacation package, Oracle Exadata gives organizations the power and flexibility to handle high-performance, high-visibility business challenges. W

David A. Kelly ( dkelly@upsideresearch.com) is a business, technology,
and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
NEXT STEPS
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