“The performance of Exadata Database Service for critical workloads surpassed our expectations and we now deliver better experiences to more customers in less time with the flexibility to scale capacity at peak times.”
Business challenges
Tok&Stok is a furniture and decor retailer in São Paulo with 68 stores in 39 Brazilian cities. While implementing an aggressive expansion plan and hybrid cloud strategy, the company found limitations in running its database and applications on-premises.
As an Oracle database customer from inception, its core business applications were supported by two Exadata X6 Database Machines in an Equinix data center. Rather than take on another renewal of its existing architecture, Tok&Stok decided to move away completely from the costs and administration involved in data center operations.
The retailer wanted a cloud environment that would deliver at least the power and performance of its Exadata hardware and enable the company to create a lasting platform for future growth and development.
Exadata Database Service has given a fantastic boost to performance, processing power, and operations.
Why Tok&Stok chose Oracle
A longtime user of Oracle Database, the company was one of the first customers in Brazil to adopt Exadata Database Machine, beginning with the Exadata X2 model, then moving to Exadata X4, and eventually to Exadata X6.
Deciding it was time to move out of the on-premises environment and away from the expenses of servers and licenses, Tok&Stok ran a successful proof of concept to test Exadata Database Service, which immediately showed visible processing gains for heavy workloads, particularly early-morning throughput.
Migrating to Exadata Cloud Service brought 45% performance gains and 54% faster query execution times to the furniture retailer Tok&Stok.
Results
Needing more compute performance to underpin its furniture retail expansion throughout Brazil, Tok&Stok migrated from Exadata Database Machines in its on-premises data center to the elastic architecture of Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Moving its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and other critical workloads to Exadata Database Services resulted in faster batch processing from weekend runs of purchasing routines, which dropped from 173 minutes to 92 minutes. Other heavy internal workloads also transacted in about half the time, from 147 minutes down to 83 minutes. The total number of SQL statement executions increased by 27% compared with previous performance in the physical environment.
Database processing time improved by 15% and query execution times were reduced by up to 54%, augmenting the omnichannel shopping experience for Tok&Stok’s customers. The company has also reduced the time spent on upgrading databases from 32 hours on-premises with an hour’s downtime to a matter of minutes and zero unavailability with OCI.
For developers building out the ERP system using Oracle Forms—with 1,100 screens in play through Oracle WebLogic Server—the average execution time to compile SQL improved by 69%, and the total time spent working in a database rose by 5.7%.
The furniture retailer also moved test and development environments, as well as disaster recovery, to the Oracle Cloud Region data center in Vinhedo, onto Exadata Database Service.
With OCI Monitoring, the company has found greater autonomy over its resources, reducing costs incurred by idle servers. Now it can elastically tune the amount of Oracle CPUs to scale with the demands of daytime operations and peaks, versus nighttime or weekend operations.
Assisted by Oracle Platinum Services, the retailer migrated Exadata on-premises to Exadata in the cloud using Oracle Active Data Guard, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery in the migration to OCI with practically no downtime.