We’ve had a wonderful time taking RoachFest global for the first time. The energy at Menlo Park and London earlier this year was incredible, and we’re thrilled to finish off our conference series where we started, with RoachFest NYC on September 26th.
As a team, we love hearing how CockroachDB has helped customers achieve their goals. This year, Rightmove shared the challenges and triumphs of providing the #1 property website in the UK. With 20+ years of property data, Rightmove knew any database migration would be complex, so they needed to find the right solution.
“How Rightmove Ensures Always-On Experiences for 2+ Billion Annual Site Visits”
Andrew Tate, Rightmove’s Head of Technology Operations, hit the stage and the crowd with some impressive statistics, setting the scene for why Rightmove needed a solid database solution. With 34 million searches per day, 1.3 billion minutes spent on their site per month, and over 1 petabyte of data in total – that’s 10^15 bytes of data – Rightmove is the go-to site for UK renters and buyers.
But the team had a problem, they were using a three-site active-active-active data center architecture that had a lot of overhead and complexity, and any database changes had to be made via a two-week release cycle. In searching for a database, the team was looking for a highly available, performant, resilient database to help:
Reduce overhead of their three-site architecture
Future proof platform capabilities
Increase innovation and business agility
Now with just a single endpoint and CockroachDB handling much of the complexity, the development teams running and managing clusters can focus on other business needs. Being able to work with structured and semi-structured data at the same time with CockroachDB has been critical for their teams building new products.
Tate shared how the team was able to manage migrating from Oracle to CockroachDB. By creating individual schemas on their on-prem database, they migrated apps one by one to minimize any impact of the changes. He shared the benefits of working with the CockroachDB support team, which has also helped the Rightmove team move towards their goals.
Lastly Tate teased some exciting new developments for Rightmove, including opportunities to leverage generative AI in their products, both on the consumer side (the daily users of the website) and within their customer products (the chargeable products and data for partners). For example, a dynamic search filter could help users filter and search properties based on what is in the property images, not just the agent’s description. We can’t wait to see what else the Rightmove team will build in the coming years.
To hear the details of Rightmove’s architecture and migration process with CockroachDB, check out Andrew Tate’s full talk below.
Don’t forget to register for RoachFest NYC! We hope to see you there on September 26th!
