NewsScape is an online news service that has been operating for seven years. Much like a child the same age, the public-service site based in the U.K. has a huge appetite for information, growing by leaps and bounds each year. In fact, the site has grown so quickly that its organizers were having trouble keeping it from misbehaving.
The Problem
NewsScape was created to showcase the database searching and handling capabilities of Enformatica, a U.K.-based company that is a subsidiary of USP Networks. The bulk of the site's traffic comes from journalists and researchers who are interested in checking into histories of companies, issues, or individuals.
The 380-GB database that sustains NewsScape (www.newscape.com) is growing at more than 50 GB a year, creating a need for a fast and reliable backup solution. And, because NewsScape is a public-service site, that solution must be reasonably priced. Andrew Clarke operates the site, which he jokingly describes as being maintained by "a man and a dog," himself and an aging golden retriever named Sambucus.
Clarke describes NewsScape as "an ad-free, moderated news-Google with a long memory." The site has four Perl processes that act as Web crawlers, accessing 3,000 major news sources on the Internet and collecting and analyzing an equal number of news stories each day. The stories are analyzed by proprietary software that scans the articles looking for language that "deviates from the zeitgeist," Clarke says.
When the deadly tsunami struck Asia in December 2004, for example, the database was crammed with stories using similar words to describe the disaster. NewsScape's virtual editor combed through these stories and looked for the ones that contained unique clusters of words not found in the mass media's coverage. These were the stories posted on NewsScape.
In addition to worldwide news, NewsScape has a fondness for providing information about companies in trouble—recalls, executive indictments, and lawsuits are all grist for the editorial mill. The service also favors unusual human-interest pieces.
The Solution
The NewsScape database saves the entire body of text for every story it collects, so visitors can search for a keyword and receive a list of articles in just a few seconds. Because stories are generated every day, and the Web crawlers never stop, the NewsScape database is like the plant in "Little Shop of Horrors"—it keeps getting fed, and consequently keeps getting bigger.
"SQL Server's native backup is slow and the end file for our site was just too huge to store easily," says Clarke. "We had tried other solutions, but they were too expensive to justify on a public-service site."
To solve his backup problem, Clarke chose Red Gate Software's SQL Backup 4 because he thought it would be a good fit, offering key features such as compression to save hardware resources, speed (up to 10 times faster than native SQL Server backup), and security, with multiple levels of AES encryption. Another key factor was the affordable price; only $395 per server.
When Clarke installed SQL Backup 4 on the NewsScape database, it compressed more than 44 million pages of data—including some tables up to 1 billion rows long—by 63 percent. Database backup and restoration took just over two hours, compared to more than 24 hours for native SQL Server backup.
Clarke expects that the log-shipping wizard within SQL Backup 4 will be a major advantage to him. He says he will use this feature to keep his primary and secondary servers synchronized. Then, if the primary server goes down, he can easily exchange servers and switch the schedule of log shipping within SQL Backup. This is automatic and can be done remotely.
"The log-shipping feature in SQL Backup will give us some capabilities that we would otherwise need to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server to receive," Clarke says. "It could save us a few thousand dollars."
While most IT departments have more resources than a man and a dog, most organizations would welcome a database backup automation solution at an affordable price. As Clarke points out, government-mandated regulations and business growth on the Internet are making very large, quickly expanding databases a fact of life in business. Ultimately, organizations with these types of databases have a choice: Manage the database or have it manage you.
Click here to download a free, fully functional, 14-day trial of SQL Backup.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.