Database Offloading

The Enterprise Database Challenge

Databases are the backbone of enterprise information systems. They are massively deployed and are used for a wide variety of applications. However, the rising cost of licenses and their limitations in scalability and ease of use present an enduring IT challenge.

EXALEAD's Solution

Exalead CloudView™ enables you to offload your databases by providing an alternative means of accessing your database content, namely search-based applications (SBAs). 

Unlike traditional database applications, SBAs provide information access via a search engine index and complementary Web technologies rather than through direct database queries (for details, see How it Works below, or download our solutions brief, Get More Out of Your Databases with SBAs).

With a CloudView SBAs, Rightmove replaced 30 Oracle CPUs with 9 Exalead CPUs—and drastically cut their search costs: "Exalead CloudView has allowed the speedy development of advanced search functionality whilst reducing search costs by 83%

Peter Brooks-Johnson, Product Director, Rightmove

Solution Benefits

Democratized Information Access

CloudView acts as a middleware solution to index your data and offer users simple information access. No more need to write cumbersome SQL queries, or to limit data access to a small cadre of tech-savvy staff.

Your users can retrieve data as easily as they do information on the Web, intuitively expanding or refining queries and navigating in the content using the intuitive faceted navigation system. When was the last time you had so much flexibility in accessing your content?

And because routine information access is separated from transaction processing and data production using the non-intrusive CloudView platform, you can extend access to an unlimited number of users without impacting existing systems.

Save on Licenses

With EXALEAD CloudView providing primary access to your database content, you can reserve licenses for essential transactional operations and scale general information access without having to purchase additional licenses.

Boost Performance

Designed from inception to handle high volume data access requests for a virtually unlimited user base, search engines enable you to instantly expand access to the content in your databases without having to scale the database infrastructure itself.

Database offloading using a CloudView SBAs enabled Gefco to cut its data latency from 24 hours to 15 minutes, and to cut the cost per user 50%. "Why didn't anyone think of this before?...Every day, I see thousands of events consolidated in real-time and I log on to the system just to be sure it's real!... The stability and performance of the application is astonishing given its highly innovative character.

Guillaume Rabier, Manager of IT Research and Projects, Gefco

Gain Agility

With information access liberated from direct database queries, your information becomes an asset that can be accessed for a far greater range of activities, by a far greater range of applications. In addition to the direct search interface, the CloudView system features an SOA architecture and support for standard Web formats and protocols for maximum IT agility.

Add Value to Database Assets

EXALEAD's technology offers the added benefit of being able to automatically contextualize and enrich your data with 'unstructured' content from other sources (the Web, other applications, etc.) at the same time that you take the load off your database systems.

How it Works

In the SBAs framework for database applications, a search engine indexes content from a database system (individual databases, data marts or data warehouses), creating an optimized view of the information contained in the database system. End user and/or application queries are then run against this index rather than directly against the database system (employing a 'document model' rather than a 'data model' for information access), achieving database offloading.

For further information, see our solutions brief, Get More Out of Your Databases with SBAs, the Gefco Case Study or Video, or the Rightmove Case Study or Video.