Progressive Insurance data performance grows by factor of four, fueling business growth online experience
At the Accelerate your Insights event last week, Quentin Clark described how SQL Server 2014 was now part of a platform that had in-built in-memory technology across all data workloads. In particular with this release Microsoft has added in-memory Online Transaction Processing delivering breakthrough performance for applications in throughput and latency.
One of the early adopter customers of this technology is Progressive Insurance, a company that has long made customer service a competitive strength. Central to customer service experience is the company’s policy-serving web app. As it updated the app, Progressive planned to add its Special Lines business such as insuring motorcycles, recreational vehicles, boats, and even Segway electric scooters. However, Progressive needed to know that the additional workloads wouldn’t put a damper on the customer experience.
Progressive was interested in In-Memory OLTP capability, which can host online transaction processing (OLTP) tables and databases in a server’s working memory. The company tested In-Memory OLTP even before SQL Server 2014 became commercially available. Modifying the policy-serving app for the test was relatively straightforward, according to Craig Lanford, IT Manager at Progressive.
The company modified eight natively compiled stored procedures, using already-documented code. In those tests, In-Memory OLTP boosted the processing rate from 5,000 transactions per second to 21,000—a 320 percent increase.
Lanford and his colleagues were delighted that the session-state database performance proved four times as fast with SQL Server 2014, adding “Our IT leadership team gave us the numbers we had to meet to support the increased database workload, and we far exceeded those numbers using Microsoft In-Memory OLTP”. The company will use the throughput gain to support the addition of its Special Lines business to its policy-servicing app and session-state database. With its use of SQL Server 2014, Progressive can run a single, larger database reliably and avoid the cost of multiple databases.
You can read more about how Progressive is using SQL Server 2014 here.
Whether you’ve already built a data culture in your organization, or if you’re new to exploring how you can turn insights into action, try the latest enhancements to these various technologies: SQL Server 2014, Power BI for Office 365, Microsoft Azure HDInsight, and the Microsoft Analytics Platform System.
