CHALLENGE:

Providing customers with a personal touch for over 40 years, Things Remembered is the go-to retailer for personalized gifts and custom engraving. Things Remembered offers gifts for practically any occasion including weddings, birthdays, graduations and anniversaries. With such a broad customer base and large catalog of products, Things Remembered has accumulated a significant amount of data over the years. They needed a rapid, scalable way to analyze and query their data. After a rigorous proof of concept phase with several vendors, Things Remembered ultimately chose Vertica due to its superior performance and total cost of ownership. After choosing Vertica, they sought expert guidance with implementation, performance tuning, and migrating procedures and ETL processes from a legacy Informix database to Vertica, requiring completely custom development. Things Remembered, known for personalization, knew their data environment needed a personal touch, which is why they came to InterWorks.

SOLUTION:

InterWorks met with the Things Remembered Data Warehousing Department to start overhauling their existing environment. They performed an extensive analysis of their Vertica environment and immediately began optimizing its performance by tuning database parameters, optimizing projections, and tweaking system settings. InterWorks also assisted with creating backups and deploying the Vertica Management Console. After tuning up Vertica, they then developed custom Python-based replacements for legacy Informix procedures and ETL processes, optimizing them specifically for Vertica. To ensure further continuity and sustainability, InterWorks also wrote backup and monitoring scripts within Python so Things Remembered can continue to manage their data effectively.

RESULTS:

Things Remembered took the first step by selecting Vertica. InterWorks came in to take care of the rest. Things Remembered experienced immediate performance and scalability improvements after InterWorks gave their Vertica environment an extensive tune up. Additionally, they endowed them with the ability to recognize and resolve future performance issues which may arise, such as disk space issues or node failures, within minutes. InterWorks greatly assisted in aiding the transition to Vertica. Mountains of valuable data were successfully brought into Vertica from Informix, making the transition seamless. Best of all, InterWorks turned the project around with incredible speed, giving Things Remembered the jump start they needed to immediately start analyzing their data within Vertica.