January 21, 2013
Mad Mimi is an email marketing service that allows users to create, send, and track email campaigns without using templates. With over 100,000 clients, Mad Mimi is storing a large amount of data that needs to be accessed quickly and easily.
In 2011, Mad Mimi realized that their data was growing beyond the capacity of their MySQL database. Rather than resharding the data, which would require an extensive operational effort, Mad Mimi decided to try Riak based on its ability to scale quickly and easily without manual sharding.
Mad Mimi now uses Riak to track email statistics, leveraging the secondary indexing feature to make retrieving data easier. Secondary indexing allows users to attach additional key/value data to Riak objects and query them by exact match or range value. Mad Mimi is currently running an 8 node cluster storing between three and five billion keys, adding between 10-20 million keys each day.
Since launching with Riak, their cluster has never gone down and it is still as fast as ever. Based on this success, they hope to move all their email tracking statistics to Riak and eliminate MySQL entirely.
For more details on Mad Mimi’s experience with Riak, check out the case study, “Email Marketing Success with Mad Mimi and Riak.”
For more information on moving from a relational database to Riak, sign up for our webcast this Thursday, covering advantages, tradeoffs and development considerations.