Case Study: Digi‑Key Corporation achieves 500x faster queries and completes backups in hours instead of days with Oracle Exadata and ZFS Storage

Digi-Key Corporation Processes Queries 500x Faster and Completes Backups in Hours Instead of Days

Digi‑Key Corporation, a global electronics‑components distributor serving more than 524,000 customers in 170+ countries and processing about 15,000 orders a day, needed an enterprise‑wide data warehouse to support rapid growth and faster, real‑time decision‑making. The company’s challenge was to accelerate batch reporting and ad hoc queries, centralize reporting and BI across source systems, and improve backup and storage performance to sustain its customer‑service commitments and international expansion.

Digi‑Key built its data warehouse on Oracle Exadata and Oracle ZFS storage appliances, deploying multiple Exadata racks for development, test, and production. The new platform became the central source for real‑time and point‑in‑time analytics, cutting a key purchasing report from 26 minutes to 32 seconds (49x) and accelerating many queries up to 500x (one query from >1 hour to 7 seconds). The solution added capacity to ingest 25–40 million rows daily, increased storage to 240 TB with redundancy, and enabled backups in hours instead of days—allowing faster decisions and continued rapid order fulfillment.

Digi-Key Corporation

Patrick Brickson

Manager, Enterprise Data Systems, Database Services