Booking.com is Europe's largest online hotel travel reservations agency — attracting over 20 million unique visitors each month. Part of priceline.com, the successful European site processes tens of thousands of online bookings every day for over 30,000 hotels in 8,000 destinations worldwide in 15 different languages.
As one of the Web's most successful online travel sites, Booking.com has experienced explosive growth. Last year, the company's development team decided they needed to re-architect their old MySQL-based system to improve their site's performance, uptime, scalability and business reporting capabilities. They employed MySQL AB's professional services group to consult on implementing a new, modern Scale-out architecture.
By dividing one main MySQL database into three separate master servers and then replicating their distinct data on multiple low-cost machines, Booking.com was able to significantly increase their site's speed, lower their infrastructure cost and improve their uptime through MySQL's new high-availability solution, based on DRBD Linux technology.
Booking.com has also subscribed to MySQL AB's new 'MySQL Enterprise Unlimited' offering, giving them premium coverage for any number of MySQL database servers — for a single, unprecedented low price. Their organisation now receives high-quality 24x7 technical support and full access to MySQL Enterprise's proactive monitoring & advisory services, which can help DBAs identify and fix potential problems with their database applications before they can impact production systems.
What is Database Scale-Out?
Scale-Out is a modern computing architecture that enables organizations to improve application performance and scalability on an incremental, as-needed basis by adding multiple replicated database servers on low-cost commodity hardware. This is in contrast to a Scale-Up approach, which requires organizations to make a large up-front investment in more expensive and complex server hardware and database licenses in order to add capacity.
In the online world, many of the largest and fastest-growing companies use MySQL to cost-effectively Scale-Out their successful businesses, saving millions of dollars over high-cost proprietary technology — including Google, Yahoo, craigslist, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Evite/Citysearch.