E-Commerce Site Buys Into New Oracle Software

Overstock.com Inc., the online seller of brand-name excess inventory, is adopting Oracle's 10g database, management tools, and a utility-computing model that will give the fast-growing retailer more IT.

Overstock runs three Oracle version 9i databases on separate clusters of Dell servers. The Linux-running Dells crunch between 2,000 and 3,000 orders an hour for apparel, jewelry, consumer electronics, and other products. The company uses Oracle's Real Application Clusters software to manage the work, but Overstocks says its IT department has limited ability to shift processing work among the clusters according to demand.

With the 10g database, the latest RAC release, and Oracle's Enterprise Manager 10g software for managing database resources, Overstock IT managers will be able to shift server processing power among clusters if one is overburdened, without shutting the system down, technology VP Shawn Schwegman says. Improved replication capabilities and a new global data-locking feature in the Oracle Database 10g and RAC 10g software will also improve resource management, adds Matt Summers, Overstock's database technologies director.

Overstock has been testing the 10g products for about six months and is installing the software within its production system. "Oracle 9i is great, but everything we see in 10g makes us think we should have been on it yesterday," Schwegman says. The company will likely go live on the 10g software sometime between late September and the start of 2005, he says.

Overstock is also using Oracle 10g to build a multiterabyte data warehouse that will collect data from the company's production system as frequently as every 15 minutes for analysis. Managers and business analysts throughout the company will use Oracle's online analytical processing software and Business Objects SA's query and reporting tools to analyze product sales data, financial information, and more.