Case Study: Tesco achieves scalable, low-latency catalog and inventory management for 10M products with Couchbase

Managing millions of products at the world’s third-largest retailer

Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer by gross revenues, needed to consolidate and serve product data for millions of SKUs across in-store and online systems. Product information lived in multiple relational databases and had to be fast to access, share and update at scale for roughly 10 million items while supporting frequently changing data structures.

Couchbase (Server and Mobile) was deployed for catalog and inventory management—using JSON, N1QL, multi-dimensional scaling, cross-datacenter replication and in-memory capabilities—to power price/promotions, stock, shopping cart and supply-chain apps. The solution delivers low-latency access to millions of documents, scales cost-effectively to 10M products and ~35K requests/sec (handling peak Black Friday traffic), and provides flexible schema support plus SQL/text querying for superior customer experiences.

Tesco