Starwood checks in with ObjectStore database for reservations
The hotel operator has been moving its system off an aging mainframe
Computerworld - Checking rates online for a room at a Sheraton or Westin hotel is no longer a finger-drumming experience. And Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., the owner and operator of that online reservations system, gives credit in large part to a humble little object database from Progress Software Corporation.
For the past year, Starwood -- which also operates W Hotels along with the Le Meredien, St. Regis and Four Points chains -- has been slowly offloading its rates and availability system from an aging mainframe to a distributed set of applications running on Linux servers, said Song Park, director of pricing and availability technologies at Starwood's headquarters in White Plains, N.Y.
Embedded in 10 of those applications are copies of the ObjectStore Enterprise real-time database from Bedford, Mass.-based Progress. While those applications still exchange data in real time with a central Oracle 10g database, they can run faster queries with the embedded ObjectStore database.
"Our throughput [with Oracle] used to be hundreds of transactions per minute," Park said. "Now, it's hundreds per second. And the way it can scale -- it doesn't even compare."
Park chose ObjectStore over caching solutions such as Coherence from Tangosol Inc. "With caching technologies, you have to pop things into memory and then take it back out," he said. "ObjectStore is more integrated into your application. You don't have to worry about the vendor's supplied container. You build your own container. Modeling and development is more seamless."
The increased speed will allow Starwood to do more complicated yield management -- industry-speak for how airlines and hotels adjust room prices in real time as supply and demand fluctuates. And that helps maximize revenue.
The change will also allow Starwood to offer better features to customers, reservations systems such as that of Sabre Holdings Corp. or travel Web sites like Expedia.com, including the ability to check prices and availability of a specific room in a particular hotel.
Park said he expects to have the rates and availabilty system completely running on the ObjectStore-embedded applications by year's end. The main challenge he has encountered with ObjectStore is deciding how deeply to integrate it into applications. Tweaking Objectstore or the data it holds can mean asking his developers to rewrite the application in which it's embedded. "With better performance, you lose a degree of flexibility," Park said.
Starwood is also about to upgrade to Version 6.3 of ObjectStore, which boasts faster Java and C++ performance, 64-bit Linux support and new management tools, according to Kenneth Rugg, vice-president of dataservices at Progress.
Read more about App Development in Computerworld's App Development Topic Center.


- Excel 2010 Cheat Sheet
- Register for this Computerworld Insider Cheat Sheet and gain access to hundreds of premium content articles, guides, product reviews and more.
- Workload Automation Challenges and Opportunities
- This Executive Brief discusses IDC's perspective on how enterprise workload management requirements are changing and highlights the ways that workload automation solutions can...
- Traditional Backup is Dead - Are You Prepared?
- Conventional backup and recovery approaches are not robust enough to meet today's data and information management challenges, let alone those of tomorrow. A...
- Redefining Backup & Recovery: A call to CIOs
- Re-evaluate your data management strategy and embrace new ways to store, access and protect your data through virtualization and cloud computing - all...
- CIO Guide to Virtual Server Data Protection
- Server virtualization is changing the face of the modern data center. CIOs are looking for ways to virtualize more applications, faster across the...
- Gartner Newsletter: Traditional Backup
- It's no secret that today's unprecedented data growth, datacenter consolidation and server virtualization are wreaking havoc with conventional approaches to backup and recovery....
- Live Webcast
How to Reduce Complexity and Automate Your Partners for Efficient E-Business: - Date: Tuesday, June 5, 2012, 2:00 PM EDT
Whether your B2B complexity is caused by multiple technologies due to M&A, business or application specific... - Live Webcast
Data Privacy and Protection in Production Environments: New Research from Ponemon Institute - Date: Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 1:00 PM EDT / 10:00 AM PDT
In a recent study conducted by Ponemon Institute, fifty-five percent of respondents... - Live Webcast
A Geek's Guide to Presenting to Business People - Live Webcast: Wednesday, June 20th at 1:00 PM EDT
Join this live webinar with Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks, to learn how to... - Redefine Expectations in the Data Center
- Need to do more with less? Watch this video to learn how HP ProLiant Gen8 servers can help your business deploy servers three...
- BMC Control-M - Single Point of Control Demo
- With BMC Control-M, you schedule and manage everything - down to the very last platform and application - from one simple interface. It's...
- Operational Analytics - Changing the Competitive Dynamics of the Business
- Date/Time: June 5, 2012, 11:00 a.m., EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST / 3:00 p.m. UTC
Please join us for this webcast, as Dr. Barry... - A Geek's Guide to Presenting to Business People
- Live Webcast: Wednesday, June 20th at 1:00 PM EDT
Join this live webinar with Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks, to learn how to... - Today's NAS: A Solution Beyond Old Limits
- Date: Tuesday, July 17, 2012 2:00 PM EDT
Traditional NAS systems don't scale beyond fixed limits. Proliferation of NAS systems leads to management...