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Customer Success Story

comScore

comScore, a provider of data-based infrastructure services and solutions for the e-commerce marketplace, realized when it began operations that the focus of Internet marketing was shifting from visitor counts to profitability. To meet this new focus, comScore turned to Sybase® technology and developed the Customer Knowledge Platform, the industry’s first source of online buying activity.

Key Benefits
	Improves ability to mine information, producing quicker results
	Provides compression ratio on data of 40 percent
	Economically scales to large amounts of data and supports data-intense reporting while controlling costs

Sybase Technology
	Sybase® IQ

Industry
Business Services

Building a Massive Data Warehouse
comScore’s Customer Knowledge Platform provides a 360-degree view of customer behavior and preferences as they visit sites throughout the Internet. The service monitors surfing and buying behavior at every site visited by consumers who have opted to have their Internet behavior analyzed.

As comScore was launching its application, the company knew it would need a data warehouse that would allow its software to smoothly handle rapid growth. As a start-up company, comScore also needed to make sure it limited the cost of building a massive data warehouse as much as possible.

comScore’s business plan called for a data warehouse that would ensure the Customer Knowledge Platform would scale economically to eventually handle over 20TB of data while supporting intense data queries from customers.

“We knew we would be tracking over a million Web users, so we needed a database that could scale very quickly, but we also needed one that was cost-effective,” said Ric Elert, vice president of engineering at comScore.

“The Most Cost-Effective Solution”
comScore implemented Sybase® IQ and was immediately impressed with its scalability, performance and data compression. The company was able to successfully build a data warehouse that enabled them to economically develop and test-market their solution and then scale it to meet the information and performance needs of their customers.

“We chose [Sybase IQ] because it met our performance requirements on the NT platform, and this meant it was the most cost-effective solution that could perform to the levels we required,” Elert said.

Improved Data Mining and Faster Results
comScore’s Web consumer information is now stored in a 2TB data warehouse. A recent survey by the Winter Corporation found this to be the largest data warehouse running on an NT platform.

“We’re adding close to 150GB every week, but we’re confident [Sybase IQ] will continue to handle the growing data load,” Elert said.

Because of the size of the data warehouse, Sybase IQ’s compression ability is a key benefit to comScore. “The compression ratio on some of the data is close to 40 percent,” Elert said. “If we were using a standard relational database management system, with up to a 10x explosion factor, we would have had a much higher storage cost. As a start-up, the money that we save is allowing us to be more profitable.”

comScore plans to scale their application to eventually handle 22TB of data.

“We need to make sure we can economically scale to large amounts of data and support data-intense reporting while not incurring significant costs,” Elert said. “[Sybase IQ’s] multi-node capabilities makes this possible and gives us easy manage-query, data-load and data-mining functions.”

“Our customers benefit directly as well,” Elert said. “The speed of [Sybase IQ] improves our ability to mine the data and produce results for our customers much more quickly. That helps them market more effectively and generate more business.”

“We chose [Sybase IQ] because it met our performance requirements on the NT platform, and this meant it was the most cost-effective solution that could perform to the levels we required.”

Ric Elert, vice president of engineering, comScore

“We’re adding close to 150GB every week, but we’re confident [Sybase IQ] will continue to handle the growing data load.”

Ric Elert, vice president of engineering, comScore