LinkShare Corporation improves data warehouse performance and availability with migration to Oracle Exadata Database Machine

13 Dec 2010 Redwood Shores - LinkShare, a performance marketing network, has significantly enhanced the performance and availability of its reporting and analysis services for hundreds of thousands of advertisers and publishers in its network using Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

By migrating its data warehouse to Oracle Exadata Database Machine, LinkShare was able to:

• Cut in half the average response time for customer queries;
• Shorten load times significantly while simultaneously serving end users;
• Enable advertisers and publishers to analyze the performance of their campaigns on a near real-time basis; and,
• Deliver a more resilient data warehouse with Oracle Real Application Clusters resulting in 24-hour a day access to data for advertisers and publishers.

Headquartered in New York City, LinkShare provides Fortune 500 businesses with a wide range of on-line marketing services including search engine marketing (SEM), lead generation and affiliate marketing. LinkShare's worldwide affiliate marketing network drives more than one million online transactions daily.

LinkShare uses Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) with Oracle Exadata Database Machine for reporting and analysis to deliver:

• Advertiser and publisher dashboards;
• A reporting system for internal and external users called Synergy Analytics; and,
• An ad hoc system for internal analysts using Oracle Answers.

The improvement in performance due to Oracle Exadata Database Machine has enabled LinkShare to deliver deeper levels of intelligence to its clients. For example, the front page of advertiser dashboards now features summaries of the top 10 publishers and their results so advertisers can quickly see how best to maximize their advertising spend.

Pythian, a database services company and a Platinum member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), helped LinkShare deploy Oracle Exadata Database Machine to internal business analysts in June 2010 and completed migration of external users onto the system in early August. Pythian is also providing ongoing operational and management support of LinkShare's Oracle Exadata Database Machine environment.

LinkShare purchased Oracle Exadata Database Machine in December 2009.

"With Oracle Exadata we have the ability to scale to tens of thousands of concurrent users, as well as service those users with acceptable SLAs while simultaneously inserting and updating large amounts of data in the database", stated Jonathan Levine, COO, LinkShare Corporation. "We're seeing great improvements in queries that require analyses across large dimensions, such as when advertisers need to know which publishers sell which products most successfully. Those types of reports are orders of magnitude faster."