Disclaimer:
Not every one of our customers can reveal the secrets behind their architecture. In this case, we’ve changed key details and names to protect their identity, whilst being able to share their unique use case and how EventStoreDB solved their problems.
Bridging relationships & boosting data quality in the sports industry
This EventStoreDB user was an early adopter of our technology, using it to gain a competitive advantage in the sports industry. Data is central to what they do, so ensuring it’s accurate and complete is paramount. Event Sourcing using EventStoreDB has provided our customer with the data quality they require, along with business agility and deep analytics.
We caught up with John Doe, who has been a Developer for our customer over the last 6 years. In that time, he has played a key part in integrating EventStoreDB into the company and shared with us how it streamlined applications and helped nurture relationships between the Software Development team and the wider business.
A ready-made solution
Now a cornerstone of our customer’s architecture, the decision to use Event Sourcing backed by EventStoreDB was made by 2 Software Engineers in John’s team. Other solutions were explored; however, the fact that EventStoreDB offered the team a ready-made solution built with Event Sourcing and CQRS in mind ultimately swayed the decision to try it.
“Do you hand roll and go through all the same problems as someone else, or do you use their product?”, John pointed out. “It doesn’t make sense to solve the same problem as EventStoreDB when so much investment and learning has gone into it”.
John noted that being open source was a huge advantage, especially where community feedback so heavily influences product development; “people are invested so you get that feedback. We thought we could invest in this product to make it suited to our use case as well”.
Over the years, EventStoreDB evolved into an important part of their customers' infrastructure, offering a single source of truth and a flexible means to solve business challenges. "We’ve got such a heavy use of Event Store”, explains John. “It’s key infrastructure to our main business services, so we’ve invested heavily into it”.
A database for (almost) all use cases
EventStoreDB is used across John’s business, suited to a variety of use cases, as John explains.
“It's built in such a way that there weren’t use cases where we were like, oh, this is so high throughput, we couldn't use it for this or you know, we needed something so low latency, we never hit that sort of problem where we found that using EventStoreDB wasn't necessarily going to be the right solution”.
He adds: “It's fair to say we use it for almost anything and everything to the point that it became a bit of a here's my hand, there's a hammer type thing: that was our Event Store. It could do everything that we needed it to do, in retrospect”.
Whilst Event Sourcing typically has a reputation for being challenging to set up and maintain, John and team have developed a series of seamless frameworks around EventStoreDB to get it to the point where their Developers don’t need to think about what’s technically happening behind the scenes. Instead, they simply write the problem up and code it into the framework.
As such, the team can put more of a focus on understanding the wider business and domain. With this in mind, John describes the relationship between Developers and Business as “on equal terms”. This has been a huge win for the team and enabled EventStoreDB to grow so quickly within the organization.
Building bridges between Developer & Business
It can be challenging for Developers to maintain relationships with wider business users and end users, especially when problem solving takes time, making changes to the system is taxing, and there’s a gap in technical understanding.
It was therefore important to our customer to make considerations for the wider business early on. In the same way it’s ingrained in the Software team to understand the business domain, they encouraged intermediaries between Developers and non-technical users, plus ensured uniformity in the language used - such as when naming events - to encourage a level of technical understanding within business users.
Features of EventStoreDB have aided the relationship between technical and non-technical teams; the database stores events as an immutable log, which can be streamed, replayed and transformed into whatever shape is needed. For our customer, the replay has been particularly useful as “the ultimate debugging” tool.
“When a user comes along with a query, they’re using the same names as events that’s in the system. So we can instantly translate it as code and travel back through the account to find what they’re speaking about."
“When a user comes along with a query, they’re using the same names as events that’s in the system. So we can instantly translate it as code and travel back through the account to find what they’re speaking about. You’ve got all the events to look through, so literally replay the events into the concept of an aggregate and you can go”, John explains. Through this, John and team can respond to and explain issues efficiently.
When asked about the more technical features of EventStoreDB, John praised the reliability of the database and availability of the data. “It’s a huge thing for us. There are very few issues and business users don’t see much from a technical standpoint if things do go a little wrong”.
The high availability of data also benefits end users and provides our customer with considerable competitive advantage. John and team have harnessed the power of real-time data to create reactive applications that mean “end-users aren’t having to press refresh buttons as updates are instant”. This has also enabled impressive business intelligence capabilities.
Diving into the data: real-time streams & Machine Learning
The event-based nature of EventStoreDB has allowed John and team to deep dive into analytics. Data is an asset for any modern enterprise and especially for the Sports industry, being able to handle a high throughput of data and make the most of the story behind it is vital.
John emphasized that “events are very useful in terms of analytics. We’ve built solutions to process those events off Event Store, which allows us to be agile in what we do as we can constantly analyze data. It’s gone from static data to real-time”.
At Event Store, we’re often asked about how compatible Machine Learning is with the database; whilst John cannot disclose too much here, he did state that “it’s standard analytics for about 90% of it and is all in-house”.
The use of Machine Learning with a state-transition database saves considerable time but also allows a more in-depth understanding of the system and customer. As John concluded, “When you have the amount of data that’s getting produced out of these systems, you’d be crazy not to use Machine Learning”.
From early adopter to Event Store experts: a summary
Over the last 6 years, our customer has showcased the profound impact of EventStoreDB to build a versatile solution for various use-cases. With a focus on data quality, business agility, and deep analytics, the decision to embrace EventStoreDB as a ready-made, open-source tool has not only streamlined operations but also fostered a transformative shift in the relationship between developers and the broader business.
John’s success story exemplifies how EventStoreDB can bridge the gap between technology and business, driving innovation and achieving remarkable results in the sports industry. If you’re looking to take the leap too, check out our EventStoreDB getting started guide here.
