SUPER RTL boosts application performance using Qure for SQL Server
SUPER RTL, the leading children's TV channel in Germany, uses DBSophic's Qure to tune the performance of its main document management application
SUPER RTL is by far the most popular TV channel among kids in Germany. For the past 10 years, SUPER RTL has reigned supreme as Germany's uncontested market leader in the children's TV market, having the broadest reach of any children's channel across Europe. The channel reaches about 97% of Germany's 35 million TV households with gross sales of over €250 million. SUPER RTL is co-owned by RTL Germany and the Walt Disney Company.
SUPER RTL used Qure to enhance the performance of a new document management application that serves about 150 users throughout the organization. The application, built upon a SQL Server database backend, was custom-developed to address SUPER RTL's changing business needs. Multiple departments, including merchandising, accounting and legal, rely heavily on the application to support the channel's core business.
SUPER RTL lacked the resources and expert knowledge to tune the SQL queries and indexing scheme of the system. "We looked at some other solutions, including tools from Quest Software," recalls Christoph Weber, SUPER RTL's Head of Application Development. "But after we tried Qure and it helped us achieve everything we wanted quickly and easily, we didn't need to evaluate any other product."
Using Qure, Weber's team ran an automated workload tuning session to optimize over 150,000 processes, representing five days of typical activity. This generated a wealth of specific recommendations for enhancing performance, including many new or modified indexes. Applying Qure's recommendations resulted in a ten-fold performance improvement to the ten most resource-consuming processes (see graph on the right).
From an end-user perspective, the benefits have been significant. In the merchandising department, the application now runs two to three times faster than before, an improvement that has not gone unnoticed. "The merchandising department called to thank us for increasing the efficiency of their workflow," recounts Weber.
Performance of ten most resource-consuming processes, before and after Qure's recommendations
