I have been working with this new feature since its release and I am always amazed to see how it can change the world. Running an online casino is no joke. Not only do providers need to make sure that their customers are protected from data theft, but they also need to be certain that servers are always stable especially during peak hours. An overloaded server disconnects a player from the game, and providers can’t afford that to happen all the time. Competition is tight, so online casinos need to keep their customers happy.
Cryptologic, the world’s first casino brand to offer gaming services to the public in 1996 through their brand InterCasino, said that in the past, they used to only handle 14,000 people on one server. But today, according to the data by Statistica, online casino is now a 39.5 billion dollar industry that’s played by millions of people around the world. A stable server today should at least be able to handle a quarter of a million requests per second.
A case study by Microsoft revealed how a casino gaming site can scale up to 250,000 requests per second, and improve the gaming experience of players through an In-Memory Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) solution in Microsoft SQL Server 2014. According to the casino gaming site, it used to be able to handle only 30,000 batch requests per second. But with the upgraded system, not only can it handle 250,000 requests per second, but also provide their players a smooth gaming experience.
As I explained in first part of series SQL Server that uses a main memory optimization and no-locking/no-latching concurrency control in order to remove the jam that’s causing the scaling up. Using the OLTP in the feature has also improved the response time to 2-3 milliseconds, which is way faster than the old system that the online casino gaming site uses that needed a 50 millisecond delay.
Every second counts in a casino game – May it be poker or slot machine. By integrating an in-memory OLTP in Microsoft’s SQL server 2014, casino providers will be able to provide a faster and more stable gaming experience to their customers. Read more about Microsoft’s case study here
