Case Study: Ziff Davis achieves sub-second real-time audience analysis at scale with MemSQL

How MemSQL was the only solution that could handle Ziff Davis's performance requirements

Ziff Davis, a leading all-digital media company reaching over 50 million in-market buyers monthly, needed a database that could ingest and query massive volumes of user behavior in real time. Prior NoSQL attempts failed to handle the simultaneous high read/write workloads, relational data needs, and dynamic storage scaling required for their distributed audience analysis.

Ziff Davis deployed MemSQL on Amazon EC2 (1 TB RAM across five nodes, ~256 CPU cores), making it the backbone of their audience profiling. The platform delivers sub-second responses for billions of events and 65 million URLs, scales out without downtime, supports standard ANSI SQL, and increased their data-collection capacity by an order of magnitude while improving performance, security, and operational monitoring.

Ziff Davis

Anthony Pusateri

Software Engineering Manager