Sabre Holdings Air Shopping Products Leverage MySQL Database

Travel Industry Leader Chooses MySQL for High Speed Search Engine Used by Travelocity, Travel Agencies and Airlines

MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced that Sabre Holdings relies on the MySQL® database to power its Air Shopping products, mission-critical enterprise services that conduct online travel searches for Sabre Holdings customers such as Travelocity, airlines and travel agents worldwide. By selecting the MySQL open source database, Sabre Holdings has significantly reduced expenses on its Air Travel Shopping Engine (ATSE) platform, a key initiative of the travel commerce leader.

Sabre Holdings, an S&P 500 company, retails travel products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. The MySQL database version 4.0 with the transactional engine is the data management backbone supporting the memory intensive searches performed on Sabre Holdings Air Shopping products. The ATSE platform continuously updates 20 million fare and rule records and 1.5 million schedules with no down time, delivering online schedules, availability, itinerary pricing and low fare searches for Sabre Holdings' global network of partner and customer companies.

"The Internet has created high demand for sophisticated fare searches, with millions of customers sifting through thousands of flights daily to find the one best suited to their needs," said Craig Murphy, chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings. "To provide the best possible service requires maintaining a massive database that can meet extreme performance demands, with very high reliability. The MySQL database has easily met these needs, and for a low total cost of ownership.”

The open source MySQL database is a high-performance relational database management system for Web site and business application development and deployment. It is noted for its speed, stability and ease of deployment. MySQL is one of the most widely used databases in the world, with more than 4 million installations.

"Sabre Holdings has historically set the bar for travel commerce technology," said Mårten Mickos, MySQL AB CEO. "Its new ATSE platform, which utilizes cost effective open source software and an open systems architecture, will be a model for other high performance systems. This deployment serves as further proof that the MySQL database is capable of supporting even the largest and most demanding enterprise applications with its trademark speed and reliability."

Sabre's MySQL Data Replicated Across Multiple Clustered Servers

Sabre Holdings has migrated its Air Shopping products from a mainframe platform to a combination of HP NonStop servers and a cluster of 45 HP rx5670 servers with MySQL running on the 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processor with the Linux operating system. Over 100 MySQL database tables are replicated on a 7 X 24 basis through GoldenGate's data synchronization software. The total amount of data held in the clustered MySQL databases is approximately 75 gigabytes.

"We benchmarked our application on several databases, including open source, commercial and a specialized in-memory relational database, and MySQL was the best performing database,” said Alan Walker, vice president of Sabre Labs.

MySQL Licensing, Multi-Platform Support Gives Sabre Options

The MySQL database runs on a wide range of operating systems and platforms, including all major Linux distributions, HP-UX platforms, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X, Novell NetWare, Microsoft Windows and more. Through MySQL's flexible platform support and licensing, Sabre Holdings can select the hardware/OS that best meets its needs, now and in the future.

"MySQL ported quickly, and it didn't require complicated configurations or set-up," Walker concluded.

The MySQL database is available for no cost under the free software/open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) and also under a non-GPL commercial license. A commercial license allows an organization to sell a MySQL-based product without making it open source. Although Sabre Holdings' current use of MySQL would comply with the GPL license, Sabre Holdings purchased a commercial license to give the company the option of selling a MySQL-based product in the future.

About MySQL

MySQL AB develops, markets and supports the MySQL database server, the world's most popular open source database. With an estimated 4 million installations and over 35,000 downloads per day, MySQL is quickly becoming the core of many high-volume, business-critical applications. Major corporations such as Yahoo!, Lucent Technologies, Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, Motorola, NASA, HP, Xerox and Cisco rely on the ultra-fast, highly-reliable MySQL database. MySQL is available under the free software/open source GNU general public license (GPL) or a non-GPL commercial license. For more information about MySQL, please go to www.mysql.com.

About Sabre Holdings Corporation

Sabre Holdings, an S&P 500 company, is a world leader in travel commerce, retailing travel products and providing distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. Sabre Holdings supports travelers, travel agents, corporations and travel suppliers through its companies: Travelocity, Sabre Travel Network, GetThere, and Sabre Airline Solutions. Headquartered in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, the company has approximately 6,500 employees in 45 countries. Full year 2002 revenues totaled $2.06 billion. Sabre Holdings is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TSG. More information is available at www.sabre-holdings.com.

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