Page 18 - Open Soource Technologies 304.indd

Unit 1: My SQL

Notes
Success Story on Big Fish Games Triples Database

ig Fish Games is a global leader in the online games industry and distributes
more games worldwide than any other online site. Within three years of its debut,
BBigFishGames.com rocketed into the Top 10 game portals on the Web and now serves
millions of downloads every day.

Their Business Challenge
BigFishGames.com is a fast-growing website with over 25 million unique customer accounts
and over 2.5 million visitors per month. In addition to the English site, Big Fish Games
also offers international game portals in Japanese, German, French and Spanish. Their
ever-growing user base is a huge boost to their business, but it also raises big challenges
around IT capacity planning. To ensure the highest quality game experience, Big Fish Games
has to accurately predict demand and increase bandwidth at the right time to keep a balance
between over-utilizing the system, introducing delays and a bad user experience, and
under-utilizing the system, resulting in a waste of capacity and money.
Their My SQL Solution

Big Fish Games started using My SQL as a small start-up. My SQL allowed Big Fish Games
to quickly grow their business with lower cost and hardware requirements, and has scaled
with the company as it has grown into an industry leader. Today, Big Fish Games deploys
40 My SQL servers to power its popular gaming website which offers thousands of games,
with new games introduced every day. To achieve the scalability and reliability required
by this high-trafficked website, Big Fish Games relies on My SQL Replication. Plus, DRBD
is used to improve high availability. In addition to customer-facing material such as the
dynamic website content, e-commerce store, game coupons and discussion forums, the
My SQL database is also used for internal operations, tracking game downloads, account
authentication, game activations and server logs.
My SQL Query Analyzer

In order to accommodate the growth in website traffic, the DBA team at Big Fish Games has
been looking into opportunities to improve application performance. Tuning and optimizing
the database is one of the options, but it won’t help if the performance problem is caused
by poorly-written SQL code.

To gain insights into the quality of the SQL code and execution statistics, Big Fish Games
has been using the command line tools to identify target areas for potential performance
improvement. However, for every problem resolution, extra effort was required to combine
information from multiple sources because each command only provided a limited
perspective.
Now, the My SQL Query Analyzer provides a consolidated view of query activities and
execution details, and has enabled Big Fish Games to quickly identify poorly running queries
and tackle the root causes directly in the SQL code. With the help of the My SQL Query
Analyzer, the DBA team caught a “bad” query running 400,000 times overnight which never
showed up in query logs. Furthermore, the My SQL Query Analyzer is very easy to use and
doesn’t require the user to be a world-class My SQL expert to fully leverage its benefits.

Since the Query Analyzer uses a Service Agent listening to application queries and
performances metrics, the My SQL servers can always be live and operational when being
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