Customer Solution Case Study
/ Largest Online Dating Service Gains Competitive Edge with Microsoft Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services—Professional services
Customer Profile
Based in Dallas, Texas, Match.com operates leading subscription-based online dating services in 25 countries, eight languages, and across five continents.
Business Situation
Match.com needed to ensure scalability and fast performance while facing high volumes of data and site traffic.
Solution
Match.com implemented a messaging solution based on Service Broker in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.
Benefits
· Improves scalability and customer service for more than 1 million subscribers.
· Provides reliable messaging across more than 100 servers.
· Gains stronger competitive advantage with faster time-to-market. / “Not many companies ever face the challenges of scale and performance requirements that we do at Match.com. With SQL Server 2008 R2 and Service Broker, we solve those challenges every day.”
Clark Rothrock, Chief Architect, Match.com
Match.com, a leader in the online dating industry, wanted to enhance its service for more than 1 million subscribers. The company needed to ensure high performance while handling more than 70 terabytes of data and 100 million page views each day. To improve scalability, Match.com implemented a solution based on Service Broker in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. The flexibility provided by this solution, which allows the company to deploy changes quickly across its entire infrastructure, also cut the company’s development time in half. As a result, Match.com can get new features to market faster and stay ahead of the competition.
Situation
Founded in 1995, Match.com has more than 1 million subscribers worldwide who expect pages to load instantly and data to appear in milliseconds. To keep customers satisfied, Match.com needs to move data across its distributed infrastructure quickly. However, when site traffic reached 100 million page views a day, the company faced performance bottlenecks.
The company matches subscribers against information in user profiles, but it does more than just searching data stores. For example, users can rate potential matches, and those ratings are then used to refine subsequent searches. Profile changes and search criteria are updated continuously. In addition, users receive alerts through email when other members respond or show interest. “We have a lot of people looking through our data on a real-time basis, and a lot of highly tuned, very analytical search algorithms that we execute to find what we believe are the best matches,” says Clark Rothrock, Chief Architect at Match.com. “These run constantly in real time and in batch mode, and we have to move data around quite a bit to ensure that it’s close to the users and search algorithms for quick retrieval and processing.”
Match.com manages approximately 70 terabytes of information spread across two data centers in the United States. The company initially used transactional replication to publish changes across 110 server computers running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software.
With transactional replication, a single server publishes changes to a distribution server, which then pushes information out to multiple subscribers. It was an effective solution, but the company needed to move data across more than 100 servers in less than two seconds.
“Not only do we have a lot of data, but we also have a commitment to execute our code against that data in a timely matter,” Rothrock says. “So when you combine our service level agreements with high volumes of site traffic and data, it’s critical that we move information around quickly.”
The company needed to find the right solution to stay competitive. “People expect the Internet to be fast,” says Rothrock. “If we can’t respond in one or two seconds, they’ll often just go somewhere else.”
For Match.com, being a marketplace leader provides both opportunity and challenge. “People come to Match.com first,” says Rothrock. “So we require scalability, and we need to offer the best experience possible.”
Solution
Match.com had worked with Microsoft products for many years and saw no reason to change, Rothrock says. “Microsoft provides a platform that keeps pace with business and the Internet, and all the tools interoperate to create a good working environment.”
To improve scalability, the company began implementing a solution based on SQL Server 2008 R2 and its Service Broker feature in May 2010. The solution runs on a combination of Enterprise and Standard editions of the database software on the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. For development, Match.com uses Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Development System.
Match.com uses Service Broker, an asynchronous messaging platform used for building event-based services, to replicate transactions across a large number of databases distributed across its servers. At Match.com, a transaction could include data such as photographs, video, or email messages, in addition to requests to execute searches.
The solution uses Service Broker to coordinate transactions and quickly move data between tiers of servers. For example, when a user rates a match, the rating is recorded on an edge server. A message containing the rating is also sent to a server called the search indexer, which aggregates and routes the data to other servers that process match requests. The servers use the ratings to filter a new batch of matches, which are then returned to the edge servers. Likewise, profile changes trigger a message to the search indexer, which in turn multicasts the updated information across multiple servers in the data warehouse. As a result, thousands of concurrent searches can be distributed across the infrastructure for optimal scalability.
By using Service Broker, Match.com has also changed the way it designs new features. With transactional replication, the publisher and subscriber databases needed the same data and schema. In the past, Match.com developers would build a structural change such as a new table and then replicate the table to multiple databases. Now, developers can quickly assemble new applications using Service Broker without changing the database structure or writing complex code to support the replication process. Processes executed in one database can be replicated to other databases that have different schemas. Rothrock says, “I’m replicating transactions now instead of replicating data.”
Benefits
Match.com is using a Microsoft solution to strengthen its competitive advantage and improve customer service with a more scalable, reliable infrastructure and faster time-to-market.
Improved Scalability and Customer Service
By implementing a solution based on an asynchronous messaging framework, Match.com has decreased performance bottlenecks. “We have a lot of data to move around, and SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Broker helps us do that more efficiently,” says Rothrock. “Ultimately, it’s all about getting information to our customers faster.”
With SQL Server 2008 R2 and Service Broker, the company can ensure scalability and continue to exceed service level agreements with its partners and customers while expanding its business. In addition to individual users, Match.com also provides services to other companies such as Yahoo! and MSN. “Not many companies ever face the challenges of scale and performance requirements that we do at Match.com,” says Rothrock. “But with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Service Broker, we solve those challenges every day. Message routers use only one third of their throughput capacity, and if they ever hit a limit, we can scale them out adding more servers.”
Enhanced Reliability
Because Service Broker provides reliable messaging across multiple databases regardless of network or server failures, Match.com can be certain that changes are accurately copied to more than 100 servers. “It’s important that our information moves around correctly, especially considering the high volumes of traffic and data that we manage,” says Rothrock. “SQL Server 2008 R2 and Service Broker ensure that data is always in the right place at the right time.”
Stronger Competitive Advantage
With a solution built on the Microsoft platform, Match.com believes it can enhance its competitive position. The solution not only supports high levels of performance and scalability, but it also helps Match.com offer enhanced features that attract and retain customers. “To stay competitive, we have to give users what they want, which includes offering them new ways to find people,” says Rothrock. “With SQL Server 2008 R2, we can keep our solution fresh with new features and functions, and also expose more people to data so that they keep coming back. “
The company has also accelerated its development process. The solution offers more flexibility, including easier transaction replication and the ability to use different database schemas. “We can develop some features twice as quickly by using SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Broker,” says Rothrock. “And it’s much easier to set up and deploy changes, especially with an infrastructure as big as ours.”
By easing development and administration, the solution helps Match.com respond faster to the marketplace. “There’s a lot of competition in our space,” says Rothrock. “So it’s important that we can build new features quicker with Service Broker components. If we can speed time-to-market, our users are happier and we all benefit.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers