Our many years in the business have brought us perspectives and experience which we bring to the table with every new client. The value is obvious. What’s more we provide individual attention and focus to each client, another tremendous benefit.

Selected Clients

Active Reasoning

Advance Publications

American DBA Online

American Law Media

Ariane Anthony Dance Co.

Community Connect, Inc.

Conducive Corporation

Cyber Logics, Inc.

Database Journal

Dotomi, Inc.

DownloadCard, Inc.

DBA Online

DBA Zine/BMC Software

Efferent Corp.

EFY Group – New Delhi, India

Far Countries, Inc.

firmView, LLC.

GL Trade, Inc.

IN2, Inc.

Infovest21, LLC.

Inside Cinema

Integrated Media, Inc.

Independent Oracle User Group

Kaplan, Inc.

Marketing Technology Solutions

Method Five, Inc.

MIDORINOSHIMA

Missing Pixel

Money-Media, Inc.

NBC/iVillage – NeverSayDiet.com

NBC/BravoTV.com

Nechsi, LLC

Net Creations, Inc.

New York Oracle User Group

Oracle Technology Network

Physical Arts Center

Proteometrics, Inc.

Real Estate Online

Riptide Communications, LLC

Robichaux & Associates, Inc.

Solbright, Inc.

Starmedia, Inc.

Streamedia, Inc.

Susquehanna International Group

Timeout NY

TSI, Inc.

Wireless Generation

Workspeed, Inc.

Xceed Corp.

A website aggregating twitter feeds for celebrities, with sophisticated search functionality.

The Problem

Having been recently acquired by a large media and entertainment conglomerate, their traffic had already tripled.  What’s more they expected their unique pageviews to grow by 20 to 30 times in the coming six months.

Our Process

We worked closely with the lead architect and designer of the site to understand some of the technical difficulties they were encountering.  We discussed key areas of the site, and where performance was most lacking.

Next we reviewed the underlying infrastructure with an eye for misconfigurations, misuse of or badly allocated resources, and general configuration best practices.  They used Amazon EC2 cloud hosted servers for the database, webserver, and other components of the application.

The Solution

Our first round of reviews spanned a couple of days.  We found many issues with the configuration which could dramatically affect performance.  We adjusted settings in both the webserver, and the database to optimally maximize the platform upon which they were hosted.  These initial changes reduced the load average on the server from a steady level of 10.0 to an average of 2.0.

Our second round of review involved a serious look at the application.  We worked closely with the developer to understand what the application was doing.  We identified those areas of the application causing the heaviest footprint on the server, and worked with the developer to tune those specific areas.  In addition we examined the underlying database structures, tables and looked for relevant indexes, adding those as necessary to support the specific requirements of the application.

After this second round of changes, tweaks, adjustments, and rearchitecting, the load average on the server was reduced dramatically, to a mere 0.10.  The overall affect was dramatic.  With 100 times reduction in the load on the server, the websites performance was snappy, and very responsive.  The end user experience was noticeably changed.  A smile comes on your face when you visit your favorite site, to find it working fast and furious!

Results

The results to the business were dramatic.  Not only were their short term troubles addressed, as the site was handling the new traffic without a hick up.  What’s more they had the confidence and peace of mind now to go forward with new advertising campaigns, secure in the knowledge that the site really could perform, and handle a 20 to 30 times increase in traffic with ease.

A location based nightlife and entertainment company built on mobile smartphone platforms.

The Problem

The website was sluggish, and performance of the mobile applications were running slowly.

Process

We worked closely with the CTO and development team, discussed sticking points focusing on relevant areas of application and infrastructure.  We drilled down to the different components of the application, such as the network, cloud hosting (amazon EC2), webservers, load balancers, and backend database.

We identified that the heaviest components were the complex mechanisms and code used to calculate location itself.  Since this was an integral part of the service, users’ mobile devices would use GPS, identify their locations, and search the database for relevant venues and information around them.

Solution Options

We identified two possible solutions, one short term and one long term.

1. Apply an advanced database indexing strategy which specifically addresses location based information.  By utilizing this technology, we would eliminate and vastly simplify the code being used to search for venues and information based on location.  Being the central component to the application, this would provide a dramatic boost in performance.
2. Build a completely new and streamlined solution to the location searching functionality, by using square location areas, instead of the more intuitive circular location area.  Since users really just want information about venues around them, they likely don’t have a specific, precise, or mathematical idea of what “around” means.  Therefore a more loose definition can lend itself much better to computer database storage, and subsequent indexing of information.

Results

By implementing the short term plan, and performing further benchmarks, the business was able to release it’s new mobile application on the blackberry carousel store.  They were featured in the carousel store, highlighted as a new business bursting with exciting features and technology.  As a featured application, they received huge spike in volume of ten times their previous average.

With the changes put in place, they sailed through this challenging period smoothly, and with confidence that their application was performing beautifully.

Their long term rollout of the more general high speed solution has been an even greater success, ironing out remaining bottlenecks, and allowing the application to scale and grow rapidly as their mobile user and customer base  expands.

• new MySQL & Postgres database setup and administration
• MySQL & Postgres tuning of problem areas
• correcting degraded MySQL & Postgres application performance
• Remote DBA – 24×7 Support Services

We have TEN years of experience working on Open Source databases in all types of industries including banking, finance, education, entertainment, media and government. Our consultants are experts in the field, with published material including books, online and print magazine articles, and lectures. Please also feel free to browse our business newsletter archives. Our monthly newsletter discusses business best practices in Oracle consulting, and Open Source integration. We are conveniently located in Rockefeller Center, and are available for onsite meetings at your New York City offices.

We’ve always been about open-source technology, integration & mixing commercial technologies such as Oracle with open-source ones such as MySQL and Linux. As open-source becomes mainstream, and more shops consider moving critical services to these technologies, we continue to provide assistance and expertise for these transitions. Whether it is performance testing and tuning, benchmarking, high availability or recovery, we can provide services for your specific needs.

All this makes your applications run faster, and your customers happy!

If you’re experiencing a real database emergency, please call us right away.  We’re located conveniently in Manhattan, and can get to your business site quickly, if necessary.

• High Availability Issues
• RAC (9i/10g) Problems
• Failover to Standby Database (DataGuard Product)
• Tuning Web Application Performance Problems
• Troubleshooting Difficult Multi-tier Applications
• Speeding Up Reports, and Performance of Data Warehouse Applications
• Fixing Your Internet/Intranet Plumbing
• Unix + Database Administration, Backups, Surveying, Auditing, etc