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April 14, 2004
MySQL at Sabre
Michael Benzinger (Sabre Research Group) is speaking (at MySQL 2004) about the process of bringing MySQL into Sabre.
Sabre sas originally a portion of American airlines, was the reservations part. American still owns, also includes travelocity. Sabre has 2.06 billion/year revenue (only get revenue when a ticket is booked), 6500 employees. Sabre originated in 1960 with the world's first OLTP, written primarily in assembly language. Sabre has to be up 100% of the time, and wants to invest in the future. Open source software is the future, using Linux and MySQL (commercial license and 24x7 support).
Sabre evaluated several databases and couldn't come to a conclustion they liked so they decided to look at open source. Databases evaluated were Oracle and times10, MySQL was determined to be as fast or faster for the kind of transactions needed. Michael had used PosGres so started by porting the application there and found performance was unacceptable. Downloaded MySQL on a weekend, on Monday morning ran the benchmarks and had both himself and the CTO in disbelief.
Over 3 billion fare combinations for a single customer request (multiple airlines, flights, fares, dates, prices, taxes, surcharges). Schedules are not stored, but created dynamically. Up to a million fares can change in a day, 5 updates a day from the airlines.
For the shopping portion everything is done on a Linux farm (45 HP rx5670 4x1.5GHz 32 GB RAM). Pricing/booking is handled by a farm of HP NonStop servers, 17 nodes with 6 processors in each. Master database (not MySQL) is kept on NonStop and replicated to the Linux farms via GoldenGate Extractor/Replicator. The GoldenGate extractor replicates anywhere from 10 to 60 GB of data a day, typically gets data to all machines within 3-6 seconds. InnoDB is used, database on Linux are currently ~60GB in size.
Sabre needed precompiled SQL statements, MySQL doesn't have. Created a script using 1000 lines of awk to convert ESQL to MySQL C API calls to get precompiled sql functions. Currently sabre is doing testing on a table that contains 1.5 billion rows of data.
site59.com is a recent sabre-related site driven by open source, aquired in 2002 by Travelocity, uses MySQL and PHP.
The results of all the work? 50% decreas in development cost, decreased fare loading times, reduced runtime costs (less time to than to keep old mainfraim up), increase in functionality.
Posted by mike at April 14, 2004 9:34 AM
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