SG Digital

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Company: SG Digital
Industry: Digital gaming
Products: Informix

Challenge

SG Digital platforms must allow their customers to process thousands of player transactions per minute and, at any point in time, make available hundreds of thousands of betting opportunities. When a sports fixture is live, their customers need to reliably and securely update prices on those betting opportunities, accept bets, and maintain latency demands across a globally distributed user base.
Performance is critical to their online gaming platforms. At peak load, a single customer can accept over 35,000 bets per minute, requiring over 5 million database queries to be flawlessly executed. The platforms must deliver a fast and responsive experience while remaining resilient to failures and compliant with data governance regulations.
Demands are high. Expectation on latency is measured in milliseconds. A latency of more than a couple of hundred milliseconds in multi-player games can severely impact the user experience with lags, time jumps, slow loading, missed bets, failed creative downloads, and continuous content buffering..

Solution

At the core of the SG Digital sports and betting platforms is HCL Informix. The reliability, high availability, and low latency of HCL Informix is paramount to success - any delay can leave customers exposed to large losses or generate an experience that quickly moves players to a competitor. SG Digital selected HCL Informix to support a variety of hardware choices, network infrastructures, security protocols, and front-end experiences. They needed a reliable, scalable, high-performing database to support multiple business demands and solution-stack architectures. Some key features employed by SG Digital are:

RSS and HDR – used for High Availability and Disaster Recovery. This distributes the read load to secondary databases that require high-performance replication with low latency.
In-place alters – support uptime and reduced downtime releases. i.e.: the ability to modify a range of data types instantly rather than requiring full column/index rebuilds. Customers accept bets from around the world and expect 24/7 availability.
Connection Manager – broker connections to the database server.
Scheduler – used to run routine administration tasks such as log rotation and statistics capture.
Monitoring via onstat and SMI tables – provides detailed information via its SMI tables and onstat commands. These are used to support routine maintenance monitoring but also to proactively guard against performance issues.

Results

With many years of experience working together, HCL has developed deep understanding of SG Digital business requirements and, as a consequence, SG Digital knows how to get the best out of the HCL Informix product. The benefits of this partnership have grown over the years and produced consistent performance, scalability, and governance results for some of the biggest betting events in the sporting calendar (such as the Grand National and Melbourne Cup). By being responsive to the concerns and requirements of SG Digital, HCL Informix has added a feature to allow for stabilizing database query execution plans, as well as made product changes to support uptime releases. That’s service beyond the contract. That’s the HCL motto.

Our DBA and architecture team take advantage of the HCL Client Advocacy Program where we have fortnightly meetings with a senior HCL architect. These open and honest discussions provide a forum for us to ask questions, learn more, and provide an opportunity to discuss product improvements that are beneficial to us both.

— Rob Hulme
VP Technical Operations
SG Digital

About the Company

SG Digital is a trusted partner to the world’s most powerful iGaming, iLottery, and Sports Betting brands. From their world-leading sports betting technology to their in-house game studios and broad the partner network of third-party suppliers, SG Digital offers customers the widest portfolio of content available across their OpenSports and OpenGaming platforms.

To learn more about HCL Informix, please contact your HCL representative or HCL Business Partner and schedule a demo.

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