Data warehouse replacement at half the cost

Case Study

Otto GmbH is Germany’s largest e-commerce site for home and living, and one of the first retailers to take its mail-order business online more than 25 years ago. Today, customers of the Hamburg-based company search 3 million products from 6,800 brands, and make 55 percent of purchases on smartphones and tablets. Otto’s data scientists use object-centric processing to analyze customer interactions across channels for a personalized shopping experience. Its team turned to Exasol as they began to process increasing volumes of data.


The Facts

retail-e-commerce
Hamburg, Germany
52,000
BYOL

The Gist

The challenge

Otto planned to use Exasol as an access layer, taking data from a data lake and warehouse to process reports. But the feeder system data structures retained twice as much data, requiring an overly complex loading path. They needed a solution behind the data warehouse to get data to Tableau quickly.


The solution

Midway through the PoC, Otto replaced its data warehouse with Exasol, retaining Hadoop as a raw data store. We quickly learned Otto’s security requirements meant going beyond a new database. Together with their team, we implemented a spark connector as part of a joint hackathon with Otto, Exasol, and partners.


“Exasol’s analytics database proved impressive. Primarily due to an excellent price-performance ratio: low costs coupled with exceptional performance and integration with Hadoop.”

Andreas B., Product Owner

Benefits

Benefits for Otto

With its new Exasol architecture, Otto teams report:


Quicker analysis and reporting:

Data is stored and processed directly in the main memory with Exasol’s in-memory technology and parallel processing. Thousands of Otto users can access the data at the same time without sacrificing speed or performance

50% savings:

Intelligent algorithms monitor and auto-tune database performance. Otto’s teams can integrate a variety of programming languages via user defined functions (UDF)

Integration

with Hadoop, Tableau, and other frameworks for data preparation

Cloud-ready:

Otto can scale with Exasol’s architecture flexibility

GUIs

for Otto teams to access data and coordinate campaigns

More brands and partners

can sell products at otto.de

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