MySQL Keeps mobile.de in the Fast Lane

With more than 315 million page impressions and over 10 million visits a month, Hamburg-based mobile.de GmbH is one of Europe's biggest online car companies. mobile.de's one central server with over 600,000 used vehicles is replicated on two locations with more than 50 database servers. For the implementation, mobile.de relies on MySQL Server.

"We use MySQL for our auto database, for our customer database and CRM, as well as a backend for our banner server", mobile.de technology department head Jan Willamowius states. "All pages are dynamically created from the MySQL database, even though some pages look static", Willamowius continued.

The mobile.de website, http://www.mobile.de, is multilingual and serves two user categories: the general public, looking to buy or sell a car, and car dealers, who pay a fee to be able to display up to 250 cars on the site. The business model of mobile.de is based mainly on the dealers' monthly subscription fees, but also on bundled products and services as well as direct banner sales.

Mr. Willamowius and co-founder of mobile.de, Ralf Prehn, are proud of the way their system was built. "We believe in having total control of the system ourselves. So we created it without outside help, apart from the regular MySQL courses that most of our administrators have attended", noted Prehn.

"We needed a replicating database that we could manage and support ourselves", Prehn continued. "We had a test installation of one of the "big names" whose consultants even had a hard time getting it to run. After getting MySQL replication to work without help in very little time, we never felt the urge to be dependent on a more complicated system. Even without considering the fabulous price/performance ratio, we are very satisfied with the easy scalability we get from our MySQL cluster."

Running on rack-mounted servers with Dual Pentium III processors ranging from 800 MHz to 1.3 GHz, and with the Linux 2.4 operating system, MySQL has never let mobile.de down, despite sizable volumes both in reading and writing queries. "We served 151 million banner ads in January 2002", said Willamowius. "The banner ads are served by two non-replicating databases. Each banner means at least one write access to the database, and we keep up quite well with the volume."

MySQL's practical easy licensing scheme for developers is also praised by Mr. Prehn. "It is easy for developers to have a local database installed on their workstation for development."

Using MySQL since 1998, mobile.de by now has a sizable crew proficient in MySQL. "Even though we love the easy maintenance of MySQL, we profited greatly from the training courses ranging from the introductory 'Using MySQL' to the more advanced 'MySQL Database Administration' and 'Optimizing MySQL' courses. Over 10 people from mobile.de have attended an official MySQL training course by now", Willamowius stated. MySQL AB training courses are offered worldwide in five languages, also in German in Hamburg, where mobile.de is located.

Despite offering substantial value for free to the general public, mobile.de GmbH is left unstruck by the downturn in the dot-com industry. "We have over 10,000 paying customers in our customer database", Willamowius says. "With a monthly fee of about one hundred euro, the customer base gives mobile.de a solid financial foundation."

Mr. Willamowius anticipates further substantial growth on mobile.de's already immensely popular web site, but he feels confident about using MySQL for the foreseeable future. "A good part of the performance we deliver to the end user when searching for cars is due to the scalable design we were able to implement with MySQL", he said. "We feel well prepared for the expected growth in numbers of accesses and database entries."