Highly Available Greetings:

Greetz uses MariaDB Galera Cluster

for on-‐‑line Greeting Card Platform

Greetz provides on-‐‑line personalized greeting cards tothousands of customers. Their web-‐‑shop application is builton Java and Hibernate (Object Relation mapping) and, priorto moving to MariaDB Galera Cluster, used Oracle™ RAC asits underlying database. Their infrastructure is based onLinux and they use Ansible for configuration management.

Greetz approached Codershipʼ’s partner SkySQL (nowMariaDB Corp.) to provide them with a replacementdatabase technology for their web-‐‑shop that wouldsignificantly reduce the total cost of ownership of theirdatabase, while ensuring high availability and a solid,predictable performance.

Challenges

Greetz was concerned by the shortage of internal OracleDBA resources and the increasing complexity of managingtheir Oracle database as their business grew. They wanted areal-‐‑time replica of their production database in theirfacility in case of disaster, but they werenʼ’t able to have thisunder the existing MySQL database license terms they hadwith Oracle.

The inflexible approach to MySQL database licensingpursued by Oracle became a significant barrier to Greetzʼ’sgrowth, would eventually become one of the key reasonsthey switched to MariaDB.

A key part of any database implementation is the accuracyof data, together with its successful migration from the oldlegacy systems. This is particularly important in the e-‐‑commerce sector where customer details and purchasinghistory must be fully traceable and auditable. This was to beone of the main challenges of the project.

Solution

Greetz insisted that Linux, Hibernate andAnsible remain as part of any replacementsolution they might implement. They werewilling to replace only the database system.

Greetz was using MySQL for BusinessIntelligence, Disaster Recovery and other supplementaryservices. These servers were updated on a regular basisusing purpose-‐‑built scripts and programs. They wantedthem migrated from MySQL to MariaDB. However, Greetzʼ’sexisting Hibernate deployment used Hibernateʼ’s defaultquery setup, which ensured that there was no native SQL toreplace prior to the migration.

MariaDBʼ’s project team concluded that migrating the

Quick Facts

Established in 2003Site Started in 2004About 60 EmployeesOver 18 millionCards Sent SinceInception

Related Sites

GreetzGreetz U.S.MariaDBCodership

About Greetz

Greetz provides an on-‐‑linepersonalized greeting card service tothousands of customers in Europe andNorth America. It was established byJohan van Vulpen and Simen Schimmel.With more than 18 million greetingcards sold to date, Greetz has becomethe largest on-‐‑line greeting cardservice in the Netherlands. Anenthusiastic team of more than 60employees is constantly working tobuild on this success.

 

application would consist of moving the database schemaand data, pointing Hibernate to the new database, end-‐‑to-‐‑end testing and then performance tuning. Only a fewdifficulties were encountered during the migration process,but all were easily addressed.

The differences between Oracle and MariaDB Galera Clusterpresented a few problems related to Hibernate, but theywere resolved. This included the development of an Ansibleconfiguration for MariaDB and Galera Cluster. The loadbalancer / failover also needed to be configured, as well asGalera Cluster itself.

Their table schema was fairly easy to migrate, but it wasoften adjusted during the migration process (e.g., data typemappings and indexing). The big issue with the migration ofdata was performance during scheduled downtime. During avery restricted time window, large amounts of data had tobe extracted from the existing servers, transferred to thenew ones and then imported into MariaDB Galera Cluster.

The testing of the resulting schema and data was acontinuous process through the migration, includingapplication testing as well as automated verification ofmigrated data. As part of the migration, consideration wasalso given to Greetzʼ’s future data growth and services toensure the system could be scaled, both horizontally andvertically.

Results

The Greetz migration project set out todeploy a more scalable, more performant andhighly available database solution whileproviding real-‐‑time disaster recovery and BIdatabases.

From a performance point of view, the new MariaDB withGalera Cluster setup is now faster than Oracle RAC andprovides just as good, if not better, stability and highavailability. MariaDB successfully reduced the total cost ofowership of Greetzʼ’s database solution by removing theneed for a SAN and significantly lowering license andmaintenance costs.

Today, MariaDB with Galera Cluster provides Greetz with astable, proven and reliable platform for its high capacityweb-‐‑shop, ensuring that it is highly available at all times.

About Codership

Codership Oy provides highavailability, no-‐‑data-‐‑loss and scalabledata replication and clusteringsolutions for open source databases.Codership's flagship product is GaleraCluster™ for MySQL, a TrueMultimaster Cluster based onsynchronous replication. GaleraCluster is an easy-‐‑to-‐‑use, high-‐‑availability solution which provideshigh system uptime, no data loss andscalability for future growth. For moreinformation about Galera Cluster,please contact info@galeracluster.com

Copyright 2014, Codership Oy. All Rights Reserved.Galera, Galera Cluster, Galera Replication are trademarks of Codership Oy.

Pohjolankatu 64 A, 00600 Helsinki, Finlandinfo@galeracluster.com  ♣  http://galeracluster.com  ♣  +358 50 5179059