Alternative databases set for mainstream adoption?
Summary
“People have a certain website dwell time, but any longer and they’re not going to hang about.” To speed up its customer experience, Bourne Leisure turned to Redis Labs, a distributor of the database of the same name. Bourne Leisure already had a caching layer to serve up web prices, based on Microsoft SQL Server, but it did not provide enough performance, says Hegarty. In 2017, the holiday company started a project to refresh its web technology across all its main businesses and the team took it as an opportunity to look again at the caching database. Although the legacy system would not allow the leap to a microservices architecture, the company was able to adopt a “mini-services” approach where reservation API agents can act on behalf of web users. “We now have a cloud-first strategy, and with that, where needed, we look for in-memory solutions, or other things that give us that same kind of performance.” For example, the team is currently considering the cloud-based Snowflake enterprise data warehouse system as an upgrade option, says Hegarty.