Oracle Database 10g powers growing MySpace.com competitor

By Mark Brunelli, News Editor 31 Jan 2007 | SearchOracle.com

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Michael Birch is relying on Oracle Database 10g to help his small company overtake MySpace.com as the largest social network in the U.S.

As the CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Bebo.com-- the third-largest social network in the U.S. and the largest social network in the U.K., Ireland and New Zealand -- Birch says it's important to keep his small firm's IT architecture simple and highly scalable. He says Oracle databases have helped him do just that since Bebo.com was founded in July 2005 and subsequently began growing about 20% per month.

"A big challenge of launching any social network is scaling," Birch said. "If you followed [Friendster.com] in 2003, they kind of failed to win and they allowed [MySpace.com] into the market because they couldn't scale. So, one of the big concerns with us was trying to keep up on the performance side."

Why Oracle?

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When it came time to choose a database management system (DBMS) upon which to run the company, Bebo.com, like many other small organizations, didn't have the time or resources to conduct a full-fledged comparative analysis. Instead, Birch, who has worked with many DBMSs over the years as a data architect for several insurance firms, relied on his own personal experience and decided that Oracle was the right choice.

"I started using Oracle, partly because it was something I was very familiar with and partly because I was confident that it would keep up with growth," Birch said. "We used it relatively early on so we wouldn't have to migrate to it later."

Bebo.com launched with Oracle Standard One Edition running on two processors. The company paid about $11,000 for the DBMS software and licensed it through Dell Computer Corp.

"That lasted us for a very long time," Birch recalled. "We were probably doing 30 million page views a day before we started considering the upgrade path beyond that."

Today, Bebo.com is running on Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition Release 2 on six processors. Birch says that infrastructure currently supports more than 100 million site page views per day and about 1.2 million image uploads per day. The company currently has no plans to upgrade to 11g when it's released later this year.

"If there were issues that we were trying to overcome with 10g, then we'd probably be pressing ahead to the next version, but the site is super stable and the database is super stable, so there doesn't seem to be any urgency to do that," Birch said.

The feature of choice

Oracle Database 10g's Index Organized Table (IOT) capabilities have been a particular boon to Bebo.com's business. The IOT option allows users to store indexes and tables and associated rows in the same place, reducing the amount of effort necessary to "fetch" information, according to Birch.

Before Bebo.com started using IOT, records for individual site users were stored in different places and on different discs, and retrieving the information required a lot of physical I/O. That dilemma led Bebo.com to IOT.

"We adopted IOT, and we converted our tables to it. You can actually convert tables on the fly and it doesn't require downtime," Birch said. "We converted a lot of tables and saw huge gains in terms of the amount of discs we needed."

Things are currently running efficiently at Bebo.com, but Birch says that -- going forward -- anything Oracle can do to help improve database performance would be welcomed with open arms.

"Performance is absolutely key to us," he said, "so anything Oracle can do to improve that is always a bonus."

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