Industry: Media & Entertainment
Outcome: halved complexity and slashed latency
LiveSponsors is a Portugal-based affiliate marketing agency in the iGaming space, known for its VIP loyalty programs and multi-channel promotional campaigns. While rebuilding its core loyalty engine, the team turned to SurrealDB to overcome rigid schemas and performance issues in legacy databases. Moving to SurrealDB and hosting on Surreal Cloud, LiveSponsors cut query times from 20 seconds to just 7 milliseconds and unified relational and document data access in one backend.
As LiveSponsors expanded across 25 iGaming operators, its MySQL and MongoDB architecture began to falter. MySQL's strict schema caused brittle integrations, while MongoDB suffered from schema drift and ballooning costs.
The hybrid setup failed to efficiently handle complex transformations and aggregation logic required for reconciling daily partner data.
Core loyalty operations faced latency spikes up to 20 seconds - far too slow for a system requiring near real-time feedback.
Managing and orchestrating data across multiple technologies increased infrastructure burden and introduced technical debt.
Consolidated the entire loyalty engine into SurrealDB’s cloud managed service, leveraging its ability to support document, relational, and graph queries in one system.
Used SurrealDB’s schema-optional approach to ingest and evolve partner data feeds without requiring downtime.
Streamlined development with SurrealQL’s blend of SQL joins and document-style deep fetching.
Empowered frontends and middleware to directly interact with data through built-in API access - reducing the need for glue code.
Replaced a multi-node, complex stack with a performant, high-memory single-node deployment.
Query performance improved dramatically, enabling fast, real-time loyalty logic.
Moved from complex, replicated nodes to a streamlined single-node setup, reducing operational complexity.
Surrealist tooling and REST endpoints accelerated development, API deployment, and schema changes.
Enabled on-the-fly balance calculations and partner recommendations, all within a unified query engine.
The team is now piloting analytics and ML use cases through SurrealML and planning future integration with a data lake.
LiveSponsors chose SurrealDB over PostgreSQL, Firebase, and MongoDB for its hybrid data model that unifies relational joins, document queries, and graph traversal. Its schema-optional design offers agility up front followed by schema structure as needed, while real-time performance and an API-native interface enable fast, frontend-driven development. More than a loyalty engine backend, SurrealDB is now LiveSponsors’ long-term platform for operational data and emerging ML use cases, supporting intelligent decision-making across workflows.
“Our old system couldn’t keep up. With SurrealDB, we rebuilt our loyalty core, halved complexity, and slashed latency to single-digit milliseconds.” – Ricardo Moreira, LiveSponsors CTO
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