AbeBooks.com Improves Online Customer Shopping Experience with Oracle® Coherence

Oracle’s Extreme Transaction Processing Capabilities Enable Online Marketplace for Books to Write a New Chapter in Shopping Basket Information Reliability, Scalability and Performance

Redwood Shores, Calif.

* Today, Oracle announced that AbeBooks.com, an online marketplace for buying and selling new and used books, is using 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 Web site.
* A distributed in-memory data grid, Oracle Coherence is designed for Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) environments, enabling organizations to predictably scale mission-critical applications by providing fast and reliable 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.
* AbeBooks.com, among the world’s largest online marketplaces for books, lists over 110 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books from 13,500 booksellers. By creating a secure and easy-to-search literary database, AbeBooks.com has established a community that booklovers frequent to find current, unique and rare editions.
* AbeBooks.com measures its XTP requirements in orders processed per day, which currently ranges up to 30,000 and is steadily growing; and in millions of daily near real-time inventory updates -- with individual booksellers accessing the system to update book listing information including price changes, quantity updates and other related information. All this information must be delivered back to the customer front-end systems in near real time.
* 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.
* Oracle Coherence enabled AbeBooks.com to fulfill its goals including:
o Technical: To efficiently distribute application processing and more effectively utilize system resources, resulting in improved safety and information state.
o Business: Oracle Coherence also allowed AbeBooks.com to fulfill the goal of an enhanced customer shopping experience by providing necessary shopping basket information to buyers for effective book purchases.
* 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 critical applications and services. For efficient 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.
* Oracle Coherence is deployed across all six AbeBooks’ Web sites - AbeBooks.com, AbeBooks.co.uk, AbeBooks.de, AbeBooks.fr, AbeBooks.it and IberLibro.com and is supported by Oracle Databases and Oracle Real Application Clusters.

Oracle Coherence Supports Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Principles
* The flexible and open architecture of Oracle Coherence lends itself to expansion within other front-end and back-end business processes within the AbeBooks.com SOA-based architecture direction.
* Future expansion plans include deploying Oracle Coherence within the independent seller components of the company’s Web site. Currently, AbeBooks.com serves a community of 13,500 independent booksellers who frequently access and update their book listings and information.

Supporting Quotes
* “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” said Leith Painter, Manager of Development, AbeBooks.com. “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.”
* “Oracle Coherence is currently being considered in each new feature development because it provides more flexibility in delivering new capabilities more quickly -- all of which allows our business to succeed,” added Painter.

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