In-Memory Technology Speeds Up Data Analytics

Just ask AdJuggler, an Alexandria, Va.-based company that runs a Software-as-a-Service ad-serving platform. The company's ad serving business was always fast-paced, but the advent of real-time bidding has taken speed to a new level.

In real-time bidding, a publisher sends an ad impression to an online exchange that puts out a request for bids. When a user arrives on a particular Web page, advertisers tender bids, and the highest bidder's ad is placed on the page. The digital ad sale happens quickly; according to Ben Lindquist, vice president of technology at AdJuggler, a buyer in a real-time bidding scenario has a 100 millisecond window to bid on a given impression.

It's that kind of speed requirement that led AdJuggler to purchase an in-memory data management product, Terracotta's BigMemory. The in-memory technology is set to debut in a limited use case later this month as part of AdJuggler's next-generation ad-serving platform.

Such deployments move the database from its traditional home in disk storage, placing it instead in memory. This approach boosts database query response times, since the trip from memory to processing core is much faster than searching for data housed on disk.

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