Case Study: Shopatron achieves continuous uptime and linear scalability with MySQL Cluster (MySQL)

MySQL Cluster Powers Rapidly Growing eCommerce Service

Shopatron is a leading eCommerce and order-management service provider supporting 700+ manufacturers and over 10,000 retail partners across North America and Europe. Rapid growth and daily batch processing of large order volumes—with peaks up to 4x during holidays—exposed a single-instance proprietary database as a bottleneck, creating scalability, high-concurrency read, and availability challenges that threatened SLAs and required an OS-flexible, scale-out solution.

After evaluating clustered options, Shopatron deployed MySQL Cluster in 2006, working with MySQL engineers to optimize schema and queries; key lookups that took three seconds on the legacy system ran in two milliseconds on MySQL Cluster. The distributed, shared-nothing architecture delivered linear scalability, automatic failover and millisecond response times, handled thousands of queries per second, eliminated a third-party support cost, and provided the continuous uptime Shopatron needed while keeping licensing and support costs low.

Shopatron

Sean Collier

CIO & COO