Case Study

Data Driven Transformation: Why PostgreSQL Was the Perfect Fit

Industry: SaaS

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Challenge

Imagine an emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that focuses on customer relationship management (CRM). Like many other companies in their growth stage, this organization found themselves facing a dilemma with regard to their data management infrastructure.

This organization previously utilized a combination of MySQL and MongoDB as their database solution, but they were unable to keep up with their growing data and the complexity of their queries. As they added customers and features, they reached numerous limitations and associated pain points:

Multiple database systems led to data consistency issues
Performance issues during peak loads
Costs associated with proprietary database licensing continued to increase
Analytics capability was severely lacking

Solution

After much deliberation, the technical team of the organization decided to move their entire database infrastructure to PostgreSQL.

When looking at other options like Oracle and SQL Server, PostgreSQL came out ahead for having a good combination of features, performance, and cost.

Several factors influenced this decision:

Cost-effectiveness: PostgreSQL’s open-source application saved a significant amount on licensing fees.
Scalability: PostgreSQL’s organization of large datasets and support for concurrent users aligned well with the company’s forecasts for growth.
Feature set: PostgreSQL supported a number of advanced features such as full-text search, support for JSON, and complex query capabilities that were able to adapt to changes in the businesses requirements.
Community support: The active community around PostgreSQL supported the company’s ability to resolve issues quickly and continue development.

The IT manager decided that only the expert team in the industry could handle this critical job. They were referred to RalanTech for this role. RalanTech’s team worked closely with the client to create a smooth migration plan. This plan aimed to reduce downtime and keep the system safe.

Implementation Steps

Migrating to PostgreSQL was a large project.

Here is a summary of this process:

Planning

Data structure/schema audit
Business process audit
Risk assessment and risk mitigation plan

Migration Strategy:

Phased migration
Parallel environment testing
Custom migration scripts

Implementation challenges:

PostgreSQL syntax conversion
Prevention of data corruption
Need for optimal queries

Solutions employed:

Team training programs
Testing processes
Third-party PostgreSQL database-integration

Results

Post-migration, there were many great improvements for the company:

Performance improvements:

Query performance: 40%
Concurrent user capacity: 3x increase
Data growth potential: increased from 1x to 5x in 2 years

Cost savings

Database licensing: 60% savings
Hardware usage: dramatic reduction
Maintenance costs: overall TCO decreased

Technical enhancements

Fully featured full-text search
Improved statistics functions
Better declared JSON usage
New read replication

Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Pre-Migration Planning

Ideation of system analysis
Comprehensive testing plan
Team training considerations

Implementation Plan

Start with pilot projects
Migrate features in phases
Monitor performance regularly

Optimization Approaches

Tune query performance
Schedule regular maintenance
Implement continuous monitoring

Roadmap

The success of this PostgreSQL migration has opened up our future:
How to implement partitioning
How to implement multi-master replication.
Contribute to the (PostgreSQL) community
How to take advantage of new features of PostgreSQL

Conclusion

This PostgreSQL migration case study shows the significant benefits a company can achieve through database modernization and making intentional decisions to adopt an open-source database compared to traditional proprietary license-based databases. With a 60% cost reduction and 40% performance improvement, the results speak for themselves.

For companies considering the same journey, this success story provides a clear roadmap for adoption and optimization of PostgreSQL in an enterprise environment.

RalanTech has experience in PostgreSQL implementation and optimization to help enterprises harness the full power of the PostgreSQL open-source database system. Their success stories further highlight the growing trend of PostgreSQL adoption in the enterprise sector, as well as the positive benefits for businesses that migrate from traditional database systems to PostgreSQL.

Are you considering PostgreSQL Migration for your enterprise? Contact our database experts today for a consultation on how you can achieve the same positive results for your organization!