AbeBooks.com enhances customer check-out experience with Oracle Coherence
By John Mathews
Oracle has announced that AbeBooks.com, an online marketplace for buying and selling new and used books, has implemented Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to enhance the online customer check-out experience while enabling increased scalability and performance of the overall website.
According to the company, Oracle Coherence is designed for extreme transaction processing (XTP) environments, enabling organizations to predictably scale applications by providing access to frequently used data. By automatically and dynamically partitioning data in-memory across multiple servers, Oracle Coherence enables continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure.
To support its growing customer base, XTP requirements and to reduce the constant transactional strain on its system resources, AbeBooks.com deployed Oracle Coherence within the infrastructure supporting its shopping basket application.
In addition to Oracle Coherence, the AbeBooks.com infrastructure includes Oracle Databases and Oracle Real Application Clusters to provide fault-tolerance and improve the performance, reliability and scalability of its applications and services. For disaster recovery and backup, AbeBooks.com uses Oracle Data Guard and relies on Oracle Streams to replicate information in real-time between the company's Calgary and Victoria, Canada data centers.
Leith Painter, manager of development at AbeBooks.com, said: "On any given day we get millions of updates from our seller community - with up to 30,000 customer orders going against those items. With additional financial information and affiliate information as well, it made 24/7 availability a tough technical and business challenge for us. Utilizing Oracle Coherence helped us improve the performance and safety of each customer transaction. It also prevented us from having to manually manage session state, allowing us to achieve both our business and technical goals at the same time."