NTUC link relies on Ashnik for a scalable database technology and support

NTUC Link Relies on Ashnik for a Highly Available and Scalable Database Technology and Support for its Campaign Management Solution

The Customer:

NTUC Link spearheads Plus! – Singapore’s largest and most successful consumer loyalty programme. The Plus! Programme has 1.5 million members and over 1,000 participating merchant outlets.

The Challenge:

NTUC Link was looking for a cost-effective open source based database for Campaign management application to keep the budgets in control. However NTUC Link wanted the database to be scalable and to provide high performance.

The Solution:

Ashnik provided EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus to be the database platform for running their Campaign Management Application since its highly available, scalable, and comes with 24*7 support.

The Benefits:

At a fraction of the client’s Oracle Database License cost, the customer was able to setup a highly available database environment which supports one of the most important IT projects for NTUC Link.

The Customer

NTUC Link spearheads Plus! – Singapore’s largest and most successful consumer loyalty programme. The Plus! Programme has 1.5 million members and over 1,000 participating merchant outlets featuring instant redemption, online rewards and innovative redemption promotions. Members can also enjoy rewards when using the Plus! VISA payment card at millions of VISA locations worldwide.

The Plus! Programme reaffirms NTUC Link’s mission to bring more relevant privileges and benefits to NTUC Link Members, customers of NTUC Link social enterprises and the general population of Singapore.

As a social enterprise, NTUC Link focuses on giving back to society and stretching the value of members’ dollars through LinkPoints and discounts.

The Challenge

NTUC Link was looking for a cost-effective open source based database for Campaign management application to keep the budgets in control. However NTUC Link wanted the database to be scalable and to provide high performance. The key technical considerations were high availability and recovery capabilities to support this new project for EDM blasts and response analysis. In order to achieve that, they were looking for a reliable vendor with expertise in database solution who would carry out the implementation and provide enterprise grade support SLAs to run the maintenance tasks post-production.

The Solution

NTUC Link had considered a few other RDBMS options prevalent in the market, including some popular proprietary databases. NTUC Link did some internal benchmarking for one of their workloads and Postgres was a clear winner amongst them. Motivated by this result, NTUC Link chose EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus to be the database platform for running their Campaign Management Application. Key considerations for this decision were –

  • A high performing and highly secure Postgres Plus Advanced Server Database
  • 24*7 enterprise class support from EnterpriseDB
  • Access to enterprise class tools like Postgres Enterprise Monitor (PEM), Replication Toolkit etc.
  • Availability of upgrades and patches
  • Strong local support on Postgres Plus Technology in terms of highly capable Ashnik team

The Benefits

At a fraction of the client’s Oracle Database License cost, the customer was able to setup a highly available database environment which supports one of the most important IT projects for NTUC Link. This helps NTUC Link to maintain continuous customer connect by leveraging technology.

The savings for NTUC Link directly translates into lower operational cost and hence benefits that can be passed on to their members, helping NTUC Link fulfil its vision.

This solution from Ashnik, based on EnterpriseDB technology has helped NTUC Link to take a leap in technology while being cost-efficient and highly productive.

The Technology

At NTUC Link, Postgres Plus DB server is hosting database for 2 applications. One of the applications is used for preparing the EDM blast and mailing it. It also captures the user responses and feeds it back to the other application, which is responsible for running analytics to create more targeted campaigns. The interaction and workflow between these two applications is handled via DB links in Postgres Plus Advanced Server which made it easy for vendors to integrate both the applications.

The database is hosted on a highly available cluster setup. Synchronous Streaming Replication has been used for providing redundancy of data. In the absence of EnterpriseDB’s Failover Manager for Postgres at that time, the failure detection and management has been setup using pgpool.

The database setup for NTUC Link’s Campaign Management is capable of Point-in-Time-Recovery. It can be recovered to the point of crash or just before a point of corruption resulting from human error.

The database currently handles an average 10-12 blasts in a month each ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 recipients. The system load is supposed to grow 5 to 10 folds in next 2-3 years of time as NTUC Link user base grows and it tries to reach out to more and more members.