Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., which owns the hotel chains, is in the midst of a project to embed the ObjectStore database from Progress Software Corp. into a suite of internally developed rates and availability applications to improve the performance of and add features to its reservation system.
The partially completed project has already yielded performance improvements, officials said.
For the past year, Starwood -- which also operates the W, Le Meredien, St. Regis and Four Points hotel chains -- has been slowly offloading the rates and availability system from an aging mainframe, said Song Park, director of pricing and availability technologies at Starwood's headquarters in White Plains, N.Y. The distributed applications are running on Linux servers, he said.
The company will soon begin embedding Version 6.3 of ObjectStore, which boasts faster Java and C++ performance, into the application.
The full project is expected to be completed by the end of this year, Park said.
Performance enhancer
While the new applications must still exchange data in real time with a central Oracle 10g database that stores rate and availability data, the embedded ObjectStore technology works as a front-end cache that significantly boosts query performance.
Using only Oracle, "our throughput used to be hundreds of transactions per minute," Park said. "Now it's hundreds per second."
"Increasing data volumes are making certain enterprise applications perform more slowly and are forcing some enterprises to look at improved database technologies and faster hardware," wrote Noel Yuhanna, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst, in his forecast for 2006.
The increased performance offsets what Park called a loss of flexibility from using an embedded database. For example, tweaking ObjectStore or the data it holds could require that developers rewrite the application in which it's embedded.
Park said he chose ObjectStore over "purer" caching systems, such as Coherence from Tangosol Inc., Cloudscape from IBM, and GemFire from GemStore Systems. "With caching technologies, you have to pop things into memory and then take it back out," he said.