March 10, 2009
FairCom announces successful deployment of c-treeACE replication solution within the BookMan application from Directory Resources
Leading provider of publishing solution deploys FairCom’s unique c‑treeACE replication solution to match precise application needs yielding significant performance gains
Note: c-treeACE became FairCom DB in October 2020.
10 March 2009 — FairCom Corporation, developer of the c‑treeACE high performance database engine, announced today the successful deployment of a c‑treeACE replication solution within the BookMan publishing solution by Directory Resources. The first production solution was installed at Canpages, Canada’s fastest growing local search provider.
Engineers from Directory Resources faced a performance dilemma when customers needed to have multiple locations accessing a single database engine. According to Darin Gurney, president of Directory Resources, “Even with the fastest WAN technology and server hardware available, we were still seeing consistent performance bottlenecks that yielded unacceptable wait times for customers.” The FairCom and Directory Resources engineering teams worked together closely to understand the problem and came up with a unique solution.
“We were able to profile this situation and see that over 90% of the traffic going from site-to-site was read operations,” noted Craig Bailey, an engineer from FairCom. “We designed a custom distributed replication solution that put a server locally in each office so that most of the reads could hit those servers. Writes are performed synchronously across both the local and remote servers, with those changes quickly propagated to all the other local servers at the individual offices.”
The result has been tremendous performance gains. In the case of read operations, overall performance increased by 500%. “The performance gains we saw in the lab were replicated in the field,” notes Gurney. “This new configuration makes a remote office across the continent as responsive as the main office.” The first implementation was with Canpages, Canada’s fastest growing local search company. Notes Peter Scott of Canpages, “Our operators are extremely pleased with the performance improvements. The significant reduction in wait times has vastly increased productivity across all of our offices.”
To address this performance challenge, a combination of FairCom’s c‑treeACE replication technologies was employed. Distributed transactions are applied to both the local and remote servers for all data update activity. c‑treeACE establishes a “pass-thru” connection for these updates from the local to the master server, and ensures appropriate locks are acquired, as well as consistency checks made to ensure records are in sync before the change is applied. Updates to the master are then replicated to all other local servers throughout the organization through the more traditional approach using transaction log based replication and a log reader agent applying the changes. With this approach, database read activity is completely satisfied locally, avoiding the performance drains of long distance network access. The result is essentially a live mirroring of two or more databases.
FairCom provides a highly tunable replication engine for use with its c‑treeACE database engine. This customizable solution lets engineers create a custom solution to meet the exact needs of their applications.
About Directory Resources
From Sales Leads to A/R to Pagination, Directory Resources’ BookMan is a powerful and proven system designed specifically for making phone books fast, easy, profitable, and on time! BookMan offers many innovative capabilities not found elsewhere. BookMan is used to produce millions of directories for over 50 publishers across North America. No other system can match BookMan’s reputation for satisfied, successful customers or powerful software. For further information contact Directory Resources at 801-377-1082 or at bookman.app.
About FairCom
FairCom Corporation has provided fast, portable and reliable database development tools for commercial environments since 1979. This technology provides the developer with the power and flexibility to quickly and reliably deal with all aspects of storing, retrieving, and updating mission critical data. FairCom technology is embedded in the software from such noted companies as Adobe, Computer Associates, NASA, and Visa. For further information regarding FairCom or the c‑treeACE embedded database engine, contact FairCom U.S. at 800-234-8180, FairCom Europe at 39-035-721-321, FairCom Japan at 81-059-229-7504 or FairCom Brazil at 55-11-3872-9802, or visit www.faircom.com.
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