Starwood adopts object database for reservations

17.01.2006
Checking rates online for a room at a Sheraton or Westin hotel is no longer a finger-drumming experience, thanks to a new reservation system that uses an object database.

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.