As the largest ticketing agency in America, Ticketmaster is responsible for processing between 150,000 and 300,000 transactions a day, and 5,000 transactions a minute during peak times.
In 2010 Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation Entertainment, an entertainment company for live events throughout America. This has led to one of the largest e-commerce sites on the internet and a database comprised of 200 million customers and fans. To service its customers, Ticketmaster has used Dell’s SharePlex for replication and high availability to support its online sales since 2002.
“Back in 2002, we decided to migrate our Microsoft SQL Server databases over to Oracle. We wanted to make the data highly available and redundant so we decided on using SharePlex,” stated Andrew Yee, database architect, Ticketmaster, during a recent DBTA webcast.
What Ticketmaster found valuable about SharePlex was being able to take multiple data sources and then aggregate the data from those sources into a single location for reporting.
Over the years, the architecture for SharePlex has evolved. In 2002, Ticketmaster began to master a 4-way data scheme. Eventually, a reporting server was added.
Also, additional replication environments were built that to connect with the reporting server. Yee noted that SharePlex was relatively easy to set up. “You define one config per SharePlex instance, and when you activate that config, it automatically creates all the processes and queues for the replication that you desire,” stated Yee. Ticketmaster has also been able to customize SharePlex by creating custom scripts that are able to detect SharePlex process status and SharePlex queue sizes.