Case Study: Dunnhumby USA achieves weeks-to-minutes segmentation speed and competitive advantage with Oracle Exadata

dunnhumby Accelerates Complex Segmentation Queries from Weeks to Minutes—Gains Competitive Advantage

dunnhumby, the global customer‑science firm that analyzes behavior from more than 400 million shoppers, needed to expand its services and deliver deeper historical and near‑real‑time insights while handling rapidly growing data volumes. The company faced pressures to speed complex segmentation and loyalty analyses, protect sensitive customer information for compliance, shorten backup and recovery windows, and optimize IT costs to maintain a competitive edge.

dunnhumby deployed Oracle Exadata along with Oracle ZFS, Advanced Analytics, Compression and security tools in an active‑active environment, consolidating data marts and accelerating workloads. Queries that once took weeks now run in minutes and segmentation tasks dropped from a week to about four hours; 4x–30x compression reduced storage and sped backups, analysts run more timely, accurate analyses on 100% of data, and the solution delivered improved scalability, security, and competitive bidding capability.

Dunnhumby USA

Chris Wones

Director of Data Solutions