NoSQL Document Database Scale-Out

Supporting the Rapid Scale-Out of Playwaze

What happens when you wake up one day to see 200,000 new users in your system? How do you make sure your application doesn’t pop before the champagne does?

Playwaze, a digital sports center for sports leagues, woke up one day to four stadiums worth of new fans on their platform.

Whether it’s a company softball league, bowling league, little league, or professional, Playwaze is where everything meets. Using their application, you can set up tournaments, create schedules, handle memberships, track player and team statistics, and a lot more.

You basically get ESPN-level coverage right at your fingertips.

Playwaze scored a serious goal in providing the British Universities & College Sport (the NCAA of Britain) with a digital platform for their 150,000 students. Their scaleup was rapid.

A Database that Simplifies the Most Complex Queries

Using RavenDB, there is no end to the depth of complexity you can work with.

Josh Levett, Software Developer at Playwaze

Playwaze has been using RavenDB since its 2.0 version in 2014.

RavenDB’s fast performance is vital for finding the correct statistics for a user. When they scaled up to over 200,000 people, maintaining that performance was a game-changer.

Multi-map reduce is another addition to their team. At any moment, a user can query all sorts of aggregate statistics for the team, their league, and even individual players.

The MVP of their systems is the field index. They can take whatever data they want – any value of any property – and map it against any other value. Using RavenDB indexes, they can get a considerable amount of data on a large dataset and extract those few documents that match the query conditions very quickly.

For example, a user can search through thousands of sprinters for anyone who has run a 100-meter dash in less than 11.5 seconds. Or they can find which basketball players average 10 points a game in the fourth quarter.

Ever notice how on TV they can show you some wild statistic on a player right as he takes the field during a live sporting event? Or when there’s a particular situation during the game, right on the spot they’ll show you stats on how the player or team has fared in similar situations?

RavenDB’s ability to simplify the most complex queries and sift through massive amounts of data lightning fast enables Playwaze to provide its users with the same ability. 

The Victory Lap

RavenDB is our only database. Any service we provide goes through RavenDB.

Brent Mills, Lead Software Developer at Playwaze

Playwaze has become a prime candidate for other major sports leagues to use as their digital play center by demonstrating its ability to handle significant traffic. 

They are working on a Facebook-like feature to enable users to include news reports, posts, and assorted information, and even to trash-talk the opponent. Along with enabling users to add images and set up their own comments sections, user engagement and total data are set to skyrocket. 

Their Document Database lets them scale up without having to reinvent themselves. A relational model, even most NoSQL options, would still require varied levels of schema, all of which set a cement foundation to their database. This means even simple changes would require a lot of work. 

Using RavenDB, Playwaze can adapt to new opportunities without blasting the basement. They can adjust to wild swings in their business model and application architecture without rewriting a lot of code. 

Playwaze landed their biggest client two years ago, triggering a scale-out of their systems by a factor of 10. Their document database’s flexibility and fault-tolerance reined in their overhead while keeping their application fast and their DevOps release cycle agile. 

Take a demo of RavenDB with a live developer to answer all your questions and start scaling out effortlessly today.