Case Study: The Ladders achieves scalable, fault-tolerant, shard-free database and major cost savings with Clustrix

The Ladders - Customer Case Study

TheLadders, a leading job site, spent over a year looking for a database that could handle unpredictable growth without forcing a costly and risky rewrite of 200,000+ lines of SQL. Their requirements were clear: scalability and fault-tolerance, elimination of sharding, removal of master single points of failure, and solutions to single-box memory limits and write bottlenecks caused by single-threaded MySQL replication.

They selected ClustrixDB, a shared‑nothing, scale‑out SQL database that maintained full MySQL compatibility, supported online schema changes, and scaled read/write throughput by adding nodes. After resilience and performance testing (including power‑fail scenarios), TheLadders eliminated sharding and the master‑SPOF, improved write and concurrency performance, reduced development overhead, and cut CAPEX dramatically—replacing an estimated $500K setup with a $150K cluster—while simplifying operations and lowering ongoing costs.

The Ladders

Dmitri Mikhailov

Principal Database Architect, TheLadders