Customer Spotlight - mamapedia

Mamapedia: Online Analytics for the Mass Market

About Mamapedia
Mamapedia is an online community for mothers. The service, which has two million users, enables members to exchange information and advice, provide referrals for local services, or simply connect and empathize with mothers who need a helping hand and some friendly advice. Like many social networking and web 2.0 enterprises, Mamapedia collects an enormous amount of user-generated content which serves as its primary attraction for members and which is also a major asset to the business. The challenge for Mamapedia is to translate their rapidly growing database into information that can drive future membership and therefore revenue growth.

How BI Helps Drive the Business
With a two million member user community, Mamapedia has collected a wealth of information for mothers and for companies seeking targeted ways to reach this economically important demographic. To mine this data, Mamapedia developed a series of online analytic queries that addressed the typical issues of site and content personalization for each user including serving up more closely targeted advertising and offers.

However, at this point, Mamapedia hit a problem — their existing database was showing clear signs that it couldn't cope with the anticipated data volumes. As Justin Lin, Mamapedia''s Vice President of Products and Co-Founder said "Our database is 300GB and growing by 1 GB a day - we had to get it to scale to billions of records".

But that's more easily said than done if your company is committed to — and has budgeted for — commodity hardware and open source software like Sun's MySQL database. This created a real business and financial pain point: the benefit of online analytics is clear but the cost of delivering them appeared to be too expensive for a high growth website that needed to spend on marketing, not IT, to drive its growth.

The Kickfire Solution
Kickfire is able to deliver the high performance to drive powerful and low-cost online analytics due to its unique architecture which is based on Kickfire's SQL Chip — a chip that understands SQL instructions and packs the power to tens of general purpose CPUs onto a single chip. This chip, combined with Kickfire's column store database, advanced compression and automated indexing, delivers high performance at the lowest possible cost. In fact, when tested by the independent Transaction Processing Council (TPC), the Kickfire appliance delivered the world's number one price/performance for both 100 and 300GB data marts.

And, for committed MySQL customers like Mamapedia, the fact that Kickfire is architected as a MySQL plug-in storage engine means that existing MySQL based queries and reports will run out unchanged with 10-1000X performance improvements.

Power to Analyze and Room to Grow
With Kickfire's analytic appliance, Mamapedia enjoys many benefits. Extremely high query performance means that their analytics take significantly less time to process, and no more time is spent optimizing queries for speed or creating custom instructions as a result, more value is realized in a shorter time. Also, because the Kickfire technology quickly loads and refreshes the data, Mamapedia is able to load new data more quickly so their analytics always reflect the latest input;their online analytics are truly online and real-time.

Finally, Kickfire's highly efficient data compression technology gives Mamapedia room to grow their data as well as to aggregate it for analysis over a longer period of time. This allows them to see more long-term trends while offering the practical element of spending less time maintaining the data warehouse.

Online Analytics for the Mass Market

"I have been working with MySQL for 10 years and Kickfire is the most amazing thing I have seen in that time.... we have to scale to billions of records and with Kickfire I can finally see how we will do it." Justin Lin, Vice President and Co-Founder, Mamapedia.

Kickfire meets the online analytic needs of Mamasource and similar companies by delivering the world's number one price-performance in an appliance form factor designed for the mass market,putting sophisticated analytics within reach of even the smallest business and budget.