Omaha Steaks Chooses MySQL for Speed and Reliability

Omaha Steaks is the leader in direct marketing of gourmet foods. A U.S.-based company located in Omaha, Nebraska, the 90-year old private company employs 2,000 people. It markets gourmet foods via various channels; inbound and outbound telemarketing, Postal mail, and through its web sites.

Originally running on the Compuserve network, Omaha Steaks has been selling its products online since 1990, and now about 20 percent of its sales come from the Internet. The company's web site is www.omahasteaks.com. Omaha Steaks also owns and operates www.alazing.com - a site that sells high quality complete meals solutions.

Omaha Steaks runs its web sites with a cluster of Linux servers. MySQL is the database that holds the shopping cart data. MySQL is the database of choice running on all 17 servers. MySQL communicates seamlessly with the backend transaction database which is an AS/400 DB2 environment. In the Omaha Steaks IT environment, orders are in process only while people are on the web site. Once the order is taken, it is deleted and is no longer stored in MySQL. The one-year old MySQL implementation has had about 8 million sessions. Average daily sessions during holidays is about 50,000 and as high as 68,000.

"I chose MySQL because of its market dominance within the Linux community," said Carter. "I wanted the database on the web server to work very quickly and to write data to the shopping cart. I didn't care about commitment control and other fancy features. I wanted a database that was fast and reliable."

The number of servers grew rapidly upon initial installation. Due to the processor licensing model of IBM DB2 for Linux, they were forced to find a suitable alternative database. Jeff Carter and his staff became big fans of open source after successfully using Java, XML and Linux. They looked at Progress and a few other databases before selecting MySQL.

The migration process took just a few days to implement the MySQL system. "We have not had a single problem with MySQL. We like the simplicity of its management -- there is nothing for us to do. MySQL is a perfect companion for Linux and we've become huge fans of open source."

Carter purchased MySQL's annual support maintenance. "I highly recommend anyone using MySQL to purchase their support. Anytime we've had to email MySQL with a technical question, within minutes we have had an answer back. I purchased the complete support package because I wanted to give them back something for the privilege of using their free database. It is a win-win situation," Carter explains.