Leading Japanese Brokerage Firm Chooses MySQL for Mission-Critical System

Aizawa Securities Co., Ltd. is one of the leading Japanese securities houses, with annual sales of $87 million, and a market capitalization of $24 million. The company, which was established in 1918, began offering online trading in October, 1999, and is now one of the leading online brokerage firms in the country. Aizawa chose to use the MySQL open source database for the mission-critical web-based customer system for viewing transactions.

"We depend for our existence on our web services to work flawlessly," Mr. Kazushige Sato, the IT manager in charge of the company's online services, maintained. "We turned to MySQL when we found the total cost of ownership of the previously-planned Oracle solution to be too high," he continued. "Not only were the license costs of Oracle considerably higher than the MySQL license, but we can now also get by with cheaper hardware costs, using a small AIX computer, where we would otherwise have to go with something much bigger."

Aizawa's securities database has a total size of approximately three GB, and each day some 100,000 transactions are loaded into the system using a script written in Ruby, a language similar to Perl, and very popular in Japan. The MySQL database easily handles the 600 customers that together generate a volume of about 4 queries per second.

When asked about his satisfaction with the MySQL Server, Aizawa's Sato praises its reliability and speed. "We get much more performance out of MySQL Server than we did with Oracle", he boasts. "I am happy to be able to provide our customers with quick services over http://www.aizawabtc.com and, to a large extent, this is thanks to MySQL."

Aizawa's servers run on IBM AIX, Apache, MySQL and PHP. In addition, data input is handled with Ruby, and printouts done with Access over MyODBC.

The Aizawa customer system was created in less than a year by SoftAgency Co., Ltd. "We know the involved components very well and have an excellent relationship with MySQL AB, said Satoshi Tatsuoka of SoftAgency. "Through our support from MySQL AB, we can be sure to get competent help for any MySQL-related problem. On several occasions, we have benefited from the fast help provided by MySQL AB."

MySQL Contact Person at Aizawa: Kazushige Sato, IT Manager, Blue Trade Center