Tractor Supply scales growth with Oracle Exadata
Tractor Supply upgraded its converged database and storage solution with Oracle Exadata X8M to increase performance and reduce batch processing time.
“Oracle Exadata is a fantastic solution for us since it provides the high performance and availability that we need for critical applications and fast backup and recovery. By far, Oracle has the best database engine on the planet. With Exadata, I sleep better at night, and my team sleeps better at night.”
Business challenges
Tractor Supply has been a leading retailer for rural farmers, ranchers, and outdoorsmen for more than 80 years. It offers an extensive mix of localized products to care for home, land, pets, and animals with legendary customer service. Recently, it has been growing rapidly by organically adding about 75 stores a year for a total of over 2,000 stores in 49 states serving 20 million members of its loyalty Neighbors Club. Combining digital capabilities with in-store purchasing ability provides customers with the convenience of purchasing products they need anytime, anywhere, and in any way they choose at low prices.
In addition to the planned business expansion, online and in-store demand boomed during the pandemic as customers locked down at home and residents moving out of urban areas into rural ones became new Tractor Supply customers. To continue providing legendary customer service in the highly competitive retail industry, Tractor Supply needed to refresh its aging, four-year-old Oracle Exadata X6 environment that managed huge amounts of data for internal analysis and processed many mission-critical applications.
Why Tractor Supply chose Oracle
Tractor Supply is a third-generation Oracle Exadata customer that chose to upgrade its converged database solution onto Oracle Exadata X8M with integrated persistent memory for increased performance and reliability.
Results
Tractor Supply’s upgrade included three Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8M systems used for production, DevTest, and disaster recovery. Exadata X8M incorporates persistent memory and RDMA over Converged Ethernet, which lowers I/O latency by up to 90% and increases analytical throughput by up to 2.5X. As a result, Tractor Supply experienced an average 3x performance improvement across its Oracle Database workloads.
Tractor Supply executives are now able to make faster and better decisions involving promotions, staffing, and inventory due to the 2X to 3X higher performance they achieved on data warehousing workloads with a 65 TB datastore. In addition, batch processing of its warehouse management system improved 7X to 8X, cutting nightly analysis run from minutes to seconds.
Tractor Supply uses Oracle Real Application Clusters to run a single Oracle Database instance across multiple servers in its Exadata environment to improve service availability while accessing shared storage for more efficiency gains. Oracle’s ZFS Storage Appliance streamlines copy and back up processes for Oracle and non-Oracle databases and provides for disaster recovery.
In addition, Tractor Supply added an Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, to support mobile point-of-sale for contactless curbside pick-up. This pre-integrated Oracle engineered system includes compute, network, storage, and virtualization technologies, making it easy for Tractor Supply to extend its ability to provide legendary customer service.