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Success Story

Emerald Spam Shield

Jason S. Short, Ph.D.
President
Emerald Technology, Inc.
www.EmeraldSpamShield.com

Early last year we began development on a new way to deploy an existing product. Key to the deployment was that the database solution would not require MSDE or SQL Server as the machines that this application runs on are dispersed in across multiple data centers. We knew that Access could be used, but found that the files themselves had a tendency to become corrupt and need repair from time to time, and that the files would grow huge with wasted space unless frequently packed. During our first testing of VistaDB we found that the files stayed small, and have never had a corruption issue.

We have generated over 42,000 updates to the database and have never once lost data. This application generates a database for application settings. This database is then pulled from a centralized server to remote systems on a timed schedule. There are never any updates pushed back, so the databases are read only. This deployment went flawlessly and as Vista has continued to provide updates, VistaDB is actually running almost 50% faster than when we first deployed with no changes in our code.

With the success of the first deployment we decided to use VistaDB as the primary database on our hosted spam filter user configuration pages. This is an ASP.NET site that allows users to securely login and update their spam settings. These settings are then stored in a vista database. We were concerned about scalability and did a lot of performance testing. Considering VistaDB is not client/server, but a file based database system, we were very pleasantly surprised.

During our initial tests we could not sustain more than 75 users in the interface making changes before the database became a bottleneck. By implementing caching strategies in ASP.NET we were able to get that number to around 100 users in the interface, but the CPU on the server was around 85%, and growing. We contacted Vista and showed them some sample applications with the performance problems, boy did they respond. Within two weeks we were given a new build that greatly improved our performance, and lowered the CPU usage. We are now supporting almost 250 simultaneous users on the same hardware with around 65% CPU usage. Once again with no code changes.

The team at Vista has been so responsive to all our of tech support requests and pleas for help that I seriously think someone should give them a customer service award. You will not be disappointed by the professionalism, and their willingness to admit with something does not work. It is very refreshing in today's climate to see a company that actually cares about customers, and that will admit mistakes. This is the type of relationship we try to have with our customers, and I think it is the best policy for any company. We highly recommend VistaDB as a database solution to any company looking for a small, easy to distribute, and fast database system.

Follow Up: 1 year later

We have good news for you guys, we have hit the 1-year mark with our product in production using VistaDB with ZERO database errors or failures. That is really something. A big kudos to you guys. The database has grown 10x in size and is hammered daily with no problems. The system is performing just as designed, even the upgrades from one version to another have never required more than a pack database command. Thanks!

Follow up: I liked the product so much I bought the company!

Most of you know by now that I (Jason Short) bought VistaDB in March of 2007. This testimonial above was written when I was using the product as a customer. The Emerald Spam Shield still uses VistaDB heavily to this day. 3.5 million emails per day, and over 2 GB of logs generated to VistaDB weekly. I believe in the product, and in managed code so much that I bought the company. I plan to document many of the extreme ways in which we use VistaDB at Emerald to help show you how we did it.