Turkish software company UBIT Bilgi Teknolojileri, a member of BAU Global Education network, builds its student management system on MySQL HeatWave.
Introduction & Background
UBIT Bilgi Teknolojileri, based in Istanbul, Turkey and part of BAU Global Education, develops student management systems for the BAU network of higher education institutions spread around the world. The systems it creates include examination platforms, online student application and registration systems, campus administration portals, and more.
Business Challenges & Goals
With the goal of standing out from other competitors in the online student systems market, UBIT needed a cloud-based relational database management system (RDBMS) for high availability and scalability.
When selecting a database to underpin its web development framework, the organization considered MySQL to be the best database for performance and price.
For the added scalability required to manage peak loads such as student midterm and final exams, UBIT decided to adopt MySQL Heatwave running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Business Results & Metrics
MySQL Heatwave helps universities in the BAU Global Education Network to rapidly scale up in peak periods such as examinations and registration while scaling down resources when demand is lower. To control costs that can quickly add up, particularly those generated by a high volume of reads and writes or complex queries that require considerable database resources, UBIT uses a query cache for MySQL.
UBIT can scale its 9 terabytes and 320 million-row data store by spreading read access across multiple MySQL servers in order to avoid overloading the master, thereby improving student system application performance by storing data in memory.
During data-intensive periods such as midterm and final exams, the query cache provides a dynamic web interface that requires fast and frequent access by students, while MySQL Heatwave running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers the scalability needed to handle peak loads.
The UBIT team uses MySQL Replication to automatically copy data from MySQL HeatWave server to as many as 15 other MySQL HeatWave databases used for developing and distributing university student systems like EasyQuiz or Onexa for online examinations.
Furthermore, universities deploying UBIT exam platforms and student registration systems employ Report Builder for MySQL to build and manage real-time reports and dashboards to display exam results and student progress.
Moreover, with its development databases in OCI, the UBIT team benefits financially from not having to hire an in-house database administrator (DBA). It also improves efficiency by being able to focus on product development and business expansion.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
UBIT selected the cost effective MySQL HeatWave service for managing the frequently accessed read/write operations and resource-intensive queries required by its student systems.
The price, performance and scalability of MySQL HeatWave in the Oracle Cloud were a major deciding factor. “With MySQL HeatWave in OCI, we have embarked on a long-term cloud adventure backed by the company that runs the best database systems in the world—Oracle,” says Burak Bodur.