Have Data Access Performance Issues? No Problem!

[Jeff Reser]

Do you have a website that you avoid visiting because it takes ages to load? You go to the home page and then send three emails before the banner is even revealed. Yamaha Motor Europe was experiencing this problem in a test environment with its dealer site, which connects its 1,500 European dealers with Yamaha distributors in 12 countries. Designed to help dealers quickly order spare parts, as well as register warranties and process claims, the complication put a serious hitch in the user experience.

The performance issue began when Yamaha shifted from a high-end application server to a virtualized environment to run its site. Page load times that used to take five seconds began to take 40 seconds. Thee site and database crashed continued to crash while in the test environment. An investigation revealed that the drivers that accompanied the commercial database the company was using were not able to operate efficiently.

In order to fix the problem before the website went live, Yamaha chose Progress DataDirect for JDBC drivers to replace the built-in drivers. Designed for optimal database access and performance on virtual machines, this eliminated the need for database client libraries, reduced administrative overhead of managing multiple vendors and diminished the amount of excessive network ‘chatter.’

After implementing the new drivers, Yamaha’s dealer website was able to function at 20 times faster than with the other driver, increasing page load times by a factor of ten. Most importantly, the database stopped crashing.

You can read the complete Yamaha Motor Europe case study here. Have questions? Ping us on Twitter @DataDirect_News!

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