Posts Tagged: ‘HCL OneDB’

How to Choose the Right Database for Commerce

19. Oktober 2021 Posted by Amanda Tevis

“What is the best database for large eCommerce websites, and why?” was a question I saw on Quora. This question is important because managing data within your eCommerce website plays a pivotal role in delivering positive user experiences and providing smooth transactions. It doesn’t matter how well your eCommerce website interface is designed and how nice the products/services look. It will be worthless unless the eCommerce website has the performance to quickly retrieve, process, and deliver information.  

Your database handles organizing and managing your company’s data. And with over 340 databases on the market, finding a powerful, reliable, and secure database for eCommerce can be a challenge, and choosing the best one can be overwhelming.   

But we are here to help!   

Below, we give some helpful tips on what to look for when choosing the right database for your eCommerce website. 

Cloud Native: When evaluating databases, look for an enterprise-grade cloud native database that makes deploying, scaling, and managing data easy within a Kubernetes environment because a cloud native database offers transactional processing speed, reliability, and flexibility all in one. 

Reliability: Consider a database with high availability (HA) that provides the performance and resiliency enterprises’ need, while meeting the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for your business. ‘High Availability’ (HA) ensures the uptime required for enterprise, mission-critical applications to ensure business success.   

Easy Deployment: Developers and agile teams want to begin development in a matter of minutes as opposed to days or weeks. Finding a database that allows for quick deployment yields significant benefits, including reduced time to value, decreased operational costs, and shortened output hours for developers. 

Versatility: A database that runs on any cloud – private, public, or hybrid–with no vendor lock-in are features to look for because its capability translates well for on-premise, edge and/or cloud and even embedded/IoT solutions. Also, finding a multi-model database that encompasses multiple disparate data models within a single, streamlined backend allows you and your company to easily combine different database model types into one integrated database engine.  

Transactional speed: Speed and performance are top considerations when choosing a database to power critical applications. A database that rapidly delivers the throughput (TPS/TPM), response time, and cost per transaction modern applications require is necessary for large eCommerce platforms. 

Ease of Use: A modern user interface to monitor and manage the database delivers business productivity and efficiency. Therefore, you must pay attention to a database’s usability from various viewpoints, including the number of active users it can support at a time, visualization, and overall ease of use. In addition, it would help if you consider ease of reporting key performance indicators (KPIs), a task scheduler, customizable alerting system, operating system, and framework compatibility. 

Cost: While scalability and transactional speed requirements are crucial considerations, you can’t overlook the total cost (TCO) of implementing a database with your eCommerce solution. Your new database should fall within your budget and align with your organization’s financial objectives and existing sales and marketing plans. 

Trial the Product: Vendors provide experts who will demo the database and perhaps build a customized demo based on your requirements. But you need to know what’s going on behind the curtain. So instead of being shown a static report, why not try to build the demo yourself.  Best thing outside of going to a class to learn about the database is requesting a free trial, so that you can work hands-on with the database. It’s a fantastic way to get an actual perspective on the product.  

Same Vendor: Now, picking an eCommerce solution from one vendor and a database from another one happens all the time and can work. But one way you can look to complement your eCommerce solution with a powerful database is to buy from the same vendor. This ensures tight integration between the products, and can deliver on innovation that customers want without being constrained by other software vendors. Plus, the same vendor carefully plans roadmaps, support, and new releases for their products to work collectively without issues. 

The list of factors to consider when choosing a database is endless. However, the above tips are some of the most valuable ones if you are looking for a place to start.  

Are you looking for a powerful, reliable, proven database to power your cloud-native application development projects? Or have questions? Contact the OneDB team, and we will assist. 

Also, check out HCL Commerce for enterprise commerce platforms that delivering powerful B2C and B2B (Business 2 Business) customer experiences.  

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OneDB for Commerce – The best option for Cloud Native Commerce?

30. August 2021 Posted by John Beechen

HCL Commerce has supported traditional relational databases such as DB2 and Oracle for many years.  In 2021 we added support for another option, OneDB. This blog talks about why customers are asking us to do this, what features it offers and how you can use OneDB as a cloud native database with HCL Commerce.

OneDB isn’t a completely new database technology. It is based on IBM Informix which HCL provides engineering support for, but OneDB is its own product with its own development stream and roadmap.  HCL’s goal with OneDB is to provide customers with a cloud native database solution that can work in the cloud or on premise with the performance that makes it automatically the best choice for solutions like HCL Commerce.

Why introduce a new database for HCL Commerce? The primary reason is that our customers have been asking for a fully cloud native solution to the database component of Commerce. Going fully cloud native for the entire Commerce infrastructure offers many benefits for scalability, high availability, ease of management and costs. For example, with Commerce and OneDB in Kubernetes, install and configuration can be done with a single Helm chart, greatly simplifying deployment, configuration and future updates.

DB2 and Oracle are proven database technologies that helps HCL Commerce deliver the highest performance for its transactional operations and other needs, however they are owned by IBM and Oracle and therefore we have no control over their roadmaps, support, end of service announcements and the like.  With HCL OneDB we wanted to have more control, so that we can imagine and deliver on innovation that our customers want without being constrained by other software vendors. The HCL teams working on OneDB and Commerce are joined at the hip, so when Commerce has a requirement, the OneDB team is able to turnaround a new release for it within days – accelerating our overall time to market.

Customers are asking for capabilities that go beyond just a transactional database.  OneDB offers versatility to Commerce customers who can use it for the following:

  • As a transactional database for Commerce to replace DB2 or Oracle.
  • As a time series database for event data, such as from IOT devices.
  • As a data warehouse to capture data for analysis.

The fact that its cloud native is big for our customers. HCL Commerce has been cloud native and containerized for some time, so the ability to bring a database that is ALSO containerized and cloud native, sits well with our vision.  The cloud native capabilities of OneDB solves some problems for Commerce customers, such as:

  • Achieve near-zero downtime for the commerce platform helps clients sell more products and services, with hot-hot capabilities reducing the need for a disaster recovery (DR) site.
  • Ability to scale the database layer using Kubernetes, the same way the Commerce application containers can be scaled.
  • Ability to distribute those containers into different cloud data centers to create active-active database availability across those different zones and geographically distributed databases for performance or compliance reasons.
  • Ability to deploy the database together with Commerce using a single Helm chart, which is much simpler faster and easier for clients, thereby reducing time to market.
  • Small footprint, low resource usage for cost efficiency.

For Developers, OneDB for Commerce has also been developed with interoperability in mind.  You can use familiar JSON to document data store patterns, but you can do “join” queries across SQL databases and document databases using SQL Drivers and OneDB’s support for the MongoDB API.  This avoids having to move all the data into OneDB, and respects customer’s desires to keep data where it is and not create data silos that are difficult to manage.

OneDB’s heritage had an emphasis on low administration.  The database was designed to work well in environments where there was no Database Administrator, and so the admin overhead of running it is low.  This helps customers with their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), as many manual tasks are automated with OneDB.  The OneDB Explore console shows you whats going on, but there isn’t as high a level of active involvement due to its low admin nature.

With Commerce, scaling for peak loads is important.  The Commerce and OneDB teams took a lot of time to ensure that prior to launching Commerce with OneDB we tested it under a variety of load scenarios, such as storefront browsing, checkout, search and administrative loads such as data ingest (loading Commerce related product or inventory data in large volumes).  Our goal was to provide equal to or better than performance than existing Commerce database options (DB2 or Oracle) with Commerce.  We wouldn’t release the product until we had that, and we’re delighted to have achieved that goal.

To learn more, schedule a demo of OneDB – available as an option with HCL Commerce Summer 2021 release.

 

 

 

 

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Top Three Requirements for eCommerce Success 

26. August 2021 Posted by Amanda Tevis

eCommerce sales for 2021 will be more than $147 billion greater than forecast before the pandemic. If you are not already invested in a robust e-commerce solution, you will need to get started to survive in the pandemic economy. Many companies initially jumped into ecommerce with a low-cost platform but found that it can’t handle the number of transactions. If companies cannot keep up with the growing number of transactions, they will miss out on sales and customers, limiting their business’s growth.  

The exponential increase in online transactions is driving a significant need for powerful enterprise class databases to help support these eCommerce platforms. In addition, cross-platforming has become necessary with the amount of complex data coming from different online channels. Of course, having a single eCommerce platform will not ensure success, but it’s a good start.  

Running an eCommerce business is not easy. Having a store and offerings to sell does not mean that people will flock in and buy your products. However, there are a few things you can do to try to ensure your company will be a success. 

As enterprises are ramping up for more transactions, let us kick things off by reviewing three key elements to eCommerce successes.  

    1. High Availability is Critical: With High Availability (in short: HA), technology vendors indicate a system that guarantees the highest possible availability. Downtime can be catastrophic. Online customers do not observe closing times. They will always want to have access to their favorite portals and platforms at any time or they will go elsewhere. With high availability, customers can place their orders with confidence, any time and happy customers will come back and repeat the process, translating to revenue growth. Most online consumers will not wait until you are ‘open’ again to buy from a particular business. Opening hours are obsolete online. They belong to the brick-and-mortar, not to today’s fast-growing world of online transactions. Bottom line: Lack of high availability means unhappy customers and less revenue.

    2. Powerful Performance: Did you know that conversion rates on eCommerce sites are a key performance indicator? It’s no secret that a fast eCommerce site with a great user experience (UX) makes shoppers happy and happy shoppers are more likely to convert. There are many things that can slow down an eCommerce website such as customer personalized suggestions, ratings, reviews, videos, large digital assets, which are all meant to create an awesome user experience but can hurt your eCommerce platform speed if not implemented correctly. The way to fix these issues is by having an eCommerce solution that is blazingly fast – sub-second storefront page load performance to help you sell more, faster. Add to that performance with advanced data replication between data centers, and you will have many happy customers. An eCommerce platform with the best performing cloud native offering is the way to go!

    3. Superior Backup and Restore Capabilities: eCommerce website backups and restores are like the insurance of online business. To ensure your online store is fully protected, your eCommerce platform and database should provide the ability to quickly archive and restore persistent data from and to different storage locations and devices. And in a Cloud Native deployment, have the ability to generate database logs on Kubernetes managed persistent storage, allowing it to survive restart and enable fast recovery.   

Sweat the small stuff. Details are crucial to the success of your data and commerce future. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and work backward to reverse engineer how your commerce and data strategies are working. Think human first, and then focus on how your software is supporting your business goals. Consider scalability, backups, cloud native solutions, and how selling more faster can grow your business. 

One way to energize your eCommerce solution is by having the HCL OneDB database as part of your eCommerce platform. HCL OneDB is a cloud native enterprise database that can help accelerate your digital transformation across your organization. OneDB offers the versatility, reliability, and ease-of-use needed to address today’s data management and application development challenges.  

Want details on how to achieve more transaction success with eCommerce? Visit the OneDB and the Commerce webpages for more information.   

 

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