[MUSIC PLAYING] Bodybuilding is an online retailer of nutritional supplements for the fitness industry. We have a global reach with distribution centers in the US, and Canada, and the United Kingdom. We also have an online community called BodySpace with about 10 million active members.
In the fitness industry, as with any industry right now, information is paramount. What are our customers doing? How are they getting to our website? What are they buying when they get here? Those are real important to us, because we want to help our customers reach those fitness goals.
We have a need to provide reports to business users every day. We were experiencing a pretty significant load on our regular production database. So we needed to move that load off onto its own system. We had a custom process in place where we were using a physical standby, opening it's a read-only every night. It was automated but not a very reliable process.
Many times it would take hours and hours to actually get the data to a place where we could begin to consume it and use it.
Some of the requirements that we were looking for in a solution-- cost was a big concern for us, something that would work with Oracle Standard Edition, and something that was easy to implement, maintain, and that would integrate into our existing monitoring system. Dell SharePlex was a great choice for us, because it was very easy to implement.
It's been a great tool to replicate data from our commerce store so that our business, intelligence, and ad hoc users can report on things like customer habits, trends, things that are selling really well.
They can run some fairly large queries without fear or risk of interrupting business.
We originally purchased Dell SharePlex to facilitate data replication, but we then realized that it was also going to have an impact for us when we wanted to do a database migration. We had some aging hardware that we desperately needed to get off of. Using SharePlex, we were able to have a new environment up and running alongside our existing environment. We were able to upgrade the database, move to a new operating system, move to a new storage platform, and do a considerable amount of data re-organization along the way. I don't think that any of that would've been possible for us if we hadn't had the Dell SharePlex tool to enable it.
SharePlex has helped the work-life balance of my entire team, especially when they're on call and support.
With SharePlex, it's been really seamless for us in not worrying about the stability of the business and reporting environment. It's a really smooth, smooth operation for us now.
It is always a goal to have our morning key metrics in front of decision makers when they're doing their morning workout. And with SharePlex, we're actually able to finally achieve that.
Dell SharePlex has made BodyBuilding.com a more successful company by allowing us to get a better handle on our data and create more personalized experience. And that really helps accomplish one of our end goals which is to really wow our customers.
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