- with same dollar spend
- 3x Faster
- for weekly database copy
- 24hrs 12hrs
Looking for real conversations
When Rival IQ's Postgres host approached them about a contract renewal on their 3TB database in 2020, they were confronted with a significant cost increase. As a big Postgres shop, Rival IQ knew they needed to go back to the drawing board on Postgres services and take a look at other major players in the market. Amazon's RDS was an obvious choice since Rival IQ hosts part of their Elasticsearch infrastructure there, but they needed real conversations with real Postgres experts and weren't thrilled about the idea of only relying on Amazon support.
Rival IQ knew several Crunchy members from the Postgres community and started taking a look at Crunchy Bridge. They ended up working closely with the Crunchy team, all the way from initial performance tests through migration planning and deployment. Crunchy support even helped plan their migration cutover and cheerleaded them through the cutover process, which ended up taking less than 10 minutes.
Testing for performance
Rival IQ provides powerful social media analytics software. Its database collects large data sets from several sources to create custom reporting, analytics, and alerts for clients. With a large data set and a business model focused on analytics, performance on the Postgres backend is critical. The Rival IQ engineering team decided to take a pg_dump of their production database and start kicking the tires with Crunchy Bridge. They wrote their own performance metrics scripts and did some heavy pounding with some of the longest queries they could run.
To ensure they were measuring apples to apples, they picked an instance size equal to the one in production. The Crunchy team then utilized their knowledge and experience running Postgres at scale to tune and configure the cloud instances for intensive workloads. The result: Rival IQ's initial testing showed a 2-3x performance increase and 5x on the long tail! Those numbers have held up in production as well.
In performance testing, we saw 5x performance improvement on our long tail queries, and 2-3x performance across the board.
Keith MooreRival IQ DevOps
Engineering automation gains
Performance was on the money and Rival IQ had the Bridge support team backing them. As they headed into the final migration to Bridge, they took a look at other database improvements and started reviewing their database copy process. Rival IQ likes to put the newest database at their developer's fingertips and takes a weekly snapshot of the databases to put into their staging and development environments. On the old host, Rival IQ would have to copy the production database, and run manual scripts to get it cleaned up, streamlined, and distributed. This could cause the data to be slightly out of sync with their Elasticsearch data and there was no easy way to calibrate the two. The process also took several days given the large database size.
With Crunchy Bridge, Rival IQ utilized some unique platform tools at their disposal to streamline and update this process. Crunchy Bridge allows them to grab a Point-in-Time recovery snapshot at the exact same time as they take a snapshot from Elasticsearch. This makes dev/staging/testing much cleaner and completely in sync for accurate testing. And for the cherry on top, they are able to use the Bridge developer API to completely script this process. With new tools and performance, Rival IQ has been able to get their database copy process down from 48 hours to less than 12. The process improvements here also allow them to do this process more often if they choose.
High hopes? We've got you covered
Rival IQ came to Crunchy Bridge with high hopes of mitigating a cost increase, gaining better performance, and getting expert support. Crunchy Data met those expectations, and exceeded them through the addition of performance gains and bonus features such as streamlined development processes and user access control.