DriveNow: Analyzing Fast-Growing Volume of E-Commerce Clickstream Data
Crate.io, developers of CrateDB, a leading open source SQL database for large volume data applications, announced that DriveNow has deployed CrateDB to enable capture, storage and real time analysis of user interactions with its online car rental system. The insights into user behavior it gains through this analysis help it better tailor its offerings to customers and improve online sales over time.
DriveNow launched in 2003 to help travelers find and easily compare the best online rates for car and campervan rentals in real time, providing online booking for motor vehicle rentals among major suppliers throughout Australia, New Zealand, Europe, North America and the UK. DriveNow aggregates pricing and availability from all major suppliers and enables direct bookings with each.
“DriveNow generates a massive amount of clickstream log data. We use this data to analyze customers’ behavior on the site to drive the direction of new features and business promotions,” said Cameron Braid, director of IT for DriveNow. “CrateDB is ideal because it’s capable of writing data at a high rate, and delivering fast queries to our business team at the same time. We couldn’t have done that using a traditional SQL database without a lot of difficulty.”
The company uses CrateDB to store clickstream data, comprising logs of pages users visit, links they click, search filters they select and site-generated emails they interact with. The data is queried to help DriveNow see how promotional campaigns, user interface design changes and A/B tests affect the user experience.
DriveNow develops and deploys CrateDB on OpenShift Origin, an open source container platform, which is Docker and Kubernetes-based. The shared-nothing, distributed database architecture of CrateDB is a natural fit for container platforms, and makes it easy to scale.
“The fact that CrateDB runs in containers so easily is awesome because when developing you can just spin up a new Docker container and test your code against a local CrateDB instance,” added Braid. “We also benefit from the CrateDB snapshotting capability. It allows us to manage our database more easily as it grows by being able to archive and delete older data. if we need to get access to that data later, we can just import that snapshot. We didn’t have that with other databases without writing a whole lot of our own code to support it.”
“DriveNow is using CrateDB to derive real, actionable insight from machine-generated data that improves their customers’ experience,” said Christian Lutz, CEO, Crate.io. “Creating a lasting bridge between data technology and real business benefit is our focus, and will always remain at the core of what we do.”