Sky – NoSQL Customer Success and Case Studies

Industry

Media & Entertainment

Customer application

Identity management
Content management and recommendations

NoSQL solution

Customer 360

Use case

User profile store
Authentication

Product

Couchbase Server

Key features

N1QL
Multi-dimensional scaling
Cross datacenter replication
In-memory database

Sky logo white

Sky, Europe’s largest media company and TV broadcaster, uses Couchbase to keep compelling content available during peak demand for over 22 million subscribers. As Europe’s leading entertainment provider, Sky has to stay a step ahead of constant technology challenges like streaming content, which put ever-increasing demands on their database. Frustrated with the scalability and performance limitations of their legacy Oracle RDBMS, Sky started its digital transformation by migrating its identity platform to Couchbase, which provides full sign-up and sign-in functionality for all Sky’s online products. The move reduced sign-in response time by 50% and had huge implications for disaster recovery, dropping the recovery time from hours to minutes.

“There are many key factors that made us choose Couchbase: scalability, high availability, XDCR, flexible schema, and advanced monitoring, to name a few.”

Krishnan Venkatasubramanian

Head of IT Architecture, Sky

CHALLENGES

Overcome limitations of legacy Oracle RDBMS to offer seamless viewing experience during massive peaks like Game of Thrones
Quickly create and update products (e.g., Sky Go and Sky Online) to add new customers
Distribute traffic load and implement DR

OUTCOMES

Unmatchable performance at scale ensures superior user experience
Flexible data model supports faster time to market for new products
Ease of maintenance and scaling lowered capital and ops costs
XDCR transfers data to multiple datacenters, reducing sign-in time by 50% and dropping recovery time from hours to minutes