Case Study: The Trial Company achieves 250x faster analytics and 50% lower data-analysis costs with Pivotal Greenplum Database (Pivotal)

Improving Data Analysis to Enable a Self-Sufficient Supply Chain

The Trial Company, the largest supermarket chain in Kyushu (148 branches in Japan, US$1.7B revenue in 2011) pursuing rapid expansion to 800 stores, struggled as transaction volumes ballooned to over 500 million per month. Its in-house data warehouse running a third‑party RDBMS could not scale, causing slow processing, no real-time analytics and reduced competitiveness.

Trial deployed Pivotal Greenplum Database (an MPP platform) alongside its existing systems and integrated with Hadoop for unstructured data. The switch delivered high availability and scalable analytics, cutting data analysis costs by ~50%, speeding some workloads up to 250×, reducing disk use by 70% (2 TB → 600 GB), and improving handset data access 5×—enabling real-time insights and a more self-sufficient supply chain.

The Trial Company