THG Ingenuity uses DBmarlin to scale and optimise performance

THG Ingenuity is a leading global ecommerce technology group, providing cutting-edge ecommerce solutions for clients designed to accelerate brand growth.

“We use a broad range of modern database platforms at scale across THG Ingenuity. Using DBmarlin has transformed our visibility of database performance across our estate,” said Jay Cooke, Head of BI and Database Solutions at THG Ingenuity. 

“DBmarlin provides a 'single pane of glass' across all our database technologies, helping multiple teams understand performance and collaborate at all stages of the application lifecycle. 

DBmarlin is extensively used by our DBAs, business intelligence engineers, and multiple application development teams, offering a standard approach to performance monitoring. It has significantly contributed to helping us increase the number of databases we support.

A key benefit is that DBmarlin allows engineers to seamlessly transfer their skills from one database technology to another.”

Collaborative Partnership

We really enjoy working with the team behind DBmarlin,” added Jay Cooke, Head of BI and Database Solutions at THG Ingenuity. “They really listen to our evolving requirements and have been able to add important functionality for us in an impressively short period of time. Over the past few years, we have built a great partnership, with many of our requests feeding directly into the DBmarlin roadmap.”

Using DBmarlin has been a real game-changer,” said Andrew Bickerton, Principal DBA at THG Ingenuity. “Being able to use one tool for tracking the query performance and health of all our clusters, rather than having to log in and look at each cluster individually, is a massive benefit.

On top of that, being able to compare performance profiles for different time periods side-by-side means that we can quickly identify which queries have changed in duration and executions, allowing us to track if there has been an application or usage change that has caused a degradation in performance.” 

Preparing for peak trading

“As we grow and migrate our applications, we rely on DBmarlin’s ability to ‘snapshot’ database performance profiles at full per-second granularity, which we can keep for as long as needed. We use ‘comparison reports’ to understand performance changes between any two periods of time. 

A great use case is being able to compare load test profiles against our real-world busiest trading periods, such as Black Friday, to proactively ensure our load tests are preparing us for our next spike in traffic. Doing this helps us mitigate potential risks and ensure good performance as part of our change management and release process.”

SQL Search

“SQL Search allows us to look up the performance of individual SQL statements across our entire estate. We can now understand the performance of a particular SQL statement over time.  Our DBAs often use this feature to discover which statements use inefficient ‘SELECT *’ within them. They can then support the business intelligence and development teams in replacing these statements with better- performing code.”  

Near real-time monitoring

Because DBmarlin monitors performance every second, it allows us to identify and alert on emerging issues rapidly, reducing the impact of rogue processes and protecting customer experience. There is a direct link between poor performance and reduced revenue, so being able to understand when you have a database problem and resolve the issue in a timely manner is critically important.”

Application Performance is here to help 

In response to this success and feedback, Russ Luke, CEO at Application Performance, said: 

“We are delighted to have been able to help the team at THG Ingenuity monitor performance and change across their database estate allowing them to scale their global ecommerce platforms to support peak trading periods like Black Friday." said Russ Luke, CEO at Application Performance.