Huge Impact

Huge Impact Entrusts 250 Million Barcode Lookup Database
to MySQL Enterprise Edition for High Availability and Security

"We moved forward with the MySQL Enterprise Edition to get features that are unavailable in the Community version, such as backup, monitoring and, above all – security and support. We wanted Oracle Support for their expert advice and to get us equipped with every security feature and performance optimization possible. That way, we gain a peace of mind and stop the kind of guesswork we were doing in the past."

Gabriel Kuperman,
CEO, Huge Impact Inc.

Introduction

Huge Impact, a digital marketing agency based in Toronto, has created Barcode Lookup, a free web and mobile application providing insight into hundreds of millions of products.

By typing in or scanning an item's barcode, general users get instant access to detailed product information, unbiased user reviews, and the ability to compare prices across retailers. For a fee, developers of shopping applications, inventory management systems, and other e-commerce ventures can incorporate the Barcode Lookup application programming interface (API) into their solutions.

To cope with growing 24/7 demand, Huge Impact required a reliable and highly secure infrastructure. Initially, it deployed the MySQL Community Edition database. But with Barcode Lookup exceeding 250 million items, it switched to MySQL Enterprise Edition for maximum availability.

Business Challenges & Goals

  • Reinforce Barcode Lookup with the highest levels of reliability, security, and cost-effective scalability for nonstop future growth.
  • Protect the application with maximum security against hackers, automated search bots, and other threats.
  • Improve backup and restore capabilities for enhancing maximum availability and security.
  • Enjoy real-time technical and consultative support from a world class professional organization.

Business Results & Metrics

  • Guaranteed maximum data security to users, fueling nonstop growth by leveraging the firewall, encryption, authentication, and high availability of MySQL Enterprise Edition.
  • Obtained 99.999% uptime thanks to the fault tolerance, automated failover, and elasticity of MySQL InnoDB Cluster, delivering high availability for online applications.
  • Improved backup and restore time by more than 90% from 10 hours to 15 minutes, by moving from mysqldump to MySQL Enterprise Backup for hot backup and recovery in the cloud.
  • Entrusted technical issues and consultative advice, to MySQL's knowledge base and product specialists, thus boosting strategic decision making.
  • Accelerated and improved Barcode Lookup features through the real-time visibility of MySQL Enterprise Monitor, which enables developers to detect and resolve performance problems during development and testing, and in production.
  • Gained the ability to grow the business with predictable expansion costs by deploying the open source MySQL Enterprise Edition as the infrastructure for a multi-million barcode database.
  • Future-proofed the rapid influx of new users through the scalability and high performance of MySQL Enterprise Edition, which can handle many more millions of products and barcodes as the database grows.
  • Monetized the business by providing highly available and secure commercial services to third-party developers, such as an API and Bulk Lookup services

Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?

Huge Impact selected MySQL Enterprise Edition over other suppliers in the conviction that it would provide the most cost-effective, secure, scalable solution for current and future growth, all reinforced by Oracle Premier Support.

"We moved forward with the MySQL Enterprise Edition to get features that are unavailable in the Community version, such as backup, monitoring and, above all - security and support. We wanted Oracle Support for their expert advice and to get us equipped with every security feature and performance optimization possible. That way, we gain a peace of mind and stop the kind of guesswork we were doing in the past," said Gabriel Kuperman, CEO, Huge Impact Inc.

Implementation

Huge Impact went live in September 2020. It upgraded from the MySQL Community Edition and switched to the full suite of management tools, features, and support of MySQL Enterprise Edition.

Implementation involved swapping binaries from MySQL Community Edition to MySQL Enterprise Edition on all Linux replication servers, installing InnoDB Cluster on the various instances and adding MySQL monitoring, backup, and security features.

Future MySQL Products

Huge Impact is planning to add a cloud-based disaster recovery server for Barcode Lookup, using MySQL Database Service running on the Oracle Gen 2 Cloud infrastructure.

About Huge Impact

Huge Impact is a Toronto-based digital marketing agency. The company's services include web, graphic, and print design and development, content creation, search engine optimization, strategic marketing, and video production. It's latest creation, Barcode Lookup, is a product search engine which contains detailed product information for more than 250 million items with a rapidly growing database as its engine.

To learn more about Huge Impact, visit https://www.hugeimpact.com