Real-time loyalty, reinvented
Industry:
Media & entertainment
Outcome:
Halved complexity and slashed latency
LiveSponsors rebuilt its loyalty engine on SurrealDB Cloud to eliminate rigid schemas and latency spikes. The move unified relational and document access and cut query times from 20 seconds to 7 milliseconds.
Key challenges
Scaling limitations
A hybrid MySQL and MongoDB architecture struggled as the platform expanded across 25 operators.
Slow transactional processing
Complex transformations and aggregation logic caused bottlenecks in daily reconciliation.
Unacceptable latency
Core loyalty operations saw spikes up to 20 seconds, too slow for real-time feedback.
Rising operational complexity
Managing multiple technologies increased infrastructure burden and technical debt.
Solutions
Migration to SurrealDB
Consolidated the loyalty engine into SurrealDB’s managed cloud service.
Flexible data modelling
Used schema-optional tables to ingest and evolve partner feeds without downtime.
SurrealQL unification
Streamlined development with SurrealQL’s blend of SQL joins and document deep fetching.
Simplified infrastructure
Replaced a multi-node stack with a streamlined, high-memory deployment.
Results
Radical latency reduction
20s → 7ms
Query performance improved dramatically for real-time loyalty logic.
Lower infrastructure overhead
↓ COMPLEXITY
Moved from complex, replicated nodes to a simplified single-node setup.
Faster iteration cycles
↑ SPEED
Surrealist tooling and REST endpoints accelerated schema changes and APIs.
Real-time intelligence
LIVE
Enabled on-the-fly balance calculations and partner recommendations.
