Microsoft SQL Server

Customer Solution Case Study

Database Products Help Real Estate Service

Evaluate Millions of Homes Daily, Cut Costs

Overview “It’s the performance and the performing

Country or Region: United States
Industry: Real Estate
characteristics of SQL Server 2005 and Quest
LiteSpeed that have allowed us to ship this
Customer Profile
Zillow.com, launched in early 2006,
product.”
is an online real estate Web site Mark Butcher, Database Manager, Zillow.com
providing customers free data and
home valuations for more than 65 Zillow.com™ is an online real estate service that helps
million U.S. homes—and growing.
The company is based in Seattle, people research the value of millions of homes in
Washington.
America. The company offers consumers free data and
Business Situation valuations for more than 65 million U.S. homes—and
The company needed a database
product that would support its growing. When the company began building the
extremely large data sets
efficiently, deliver results to database in 2005, the challenge was to find a product
customer queries quickly, and scale
that could easily handle its very large data sets and
to manage tremendous growth over
time. deliver quick responses to user queries. After evaluating
Solution several database products, the company implemented
The company chose Microsoft® SQL
Server™ 2005, which performed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition, which
significantly faster than
performed between 40 to 200 percent faster than its
competitors, and LiteSpeed for SQL
Server by Quest, which greatly closest competitors. To back up its databases, the
increased backup and recovery
efficiency. company chose LiteSpeed for SQL Server Professional,

Benefits by Quest Software, which cuts backup times and file size
 Delivers data quickly
by 50 percent. Both solutions help Zillow respond to
 Improves backup and recovery
efficiency customer queries quickly and save significant costs
 Situation
Zillow.com™ is an online real estate
service dedicated to helping real
estate consumers answer the
question, "How much is this home
really worth?" Users can access—
anonymously and free of charge— the
kinds of tools and information
previously exclusive to real estate
professionals. Among other things,
users can get data and valuations for
more than 65 million U.S. homes, as
well as median values for almost any
given region. Based in Seattle, the
company launched in early 2006 and
“The LiteSpeed currently has just over 100
backup files are employees.
about 20 percent of As Zillow began the task of putting
the size of the tools and information into the hands
of consumers, the big questions, says
database file. And Mark Butcher, Database Manager at
LiteSpeed performs Zillow, were “How do we take all of
this data, how do we manage it, and
backups and how do we allow our customers to
recoveries in just query it effectively?” The sheer
volume of data that the company has
half the time.” to store and serve to the public is
Mark Butcher, Database Manager, massive. “What we build is actually
Zillow.com an operational data warehouse for
customers,” he says. “We present
tremendously large sets of data to
millions of customers to be queried
and searched very quickly—that in
itself is quite a challenge.”
What’s more, Zillow recalculates
home valuations for each property
every day. As neighborhood home
sales fluctuate and other market
conditions change, each property in
an area is affected. Each day, the
valuations need to be stored so that
Zillow can provide historical graphs
on home valuations over time. “The
graphs on our site reflect this history.
In many places we have 10 years of
valuation history,” says Butcher.
The company needed a database
application that could perform
powerfully enough to easily handle its
large data sets and return quick
responses to user queries. The
product would also need to scale for
the enormous growth in store for
Zillow—the company projects to at
least double its offerings within a
year.
Solution
In November 2005, Zillow.com
investigated several solutions,
including Microsoft® SQL Server™
2000 and 2005. Says Butcher, “There
were a number of database vendors
and plans that were being evaluated,
and it really came down to pricing and
a series of performance tests.” The
company considered MySQL,
PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL
Server (2000 and 2005). “We quickly
pared down the list to MySQL and the
Microsoft products, based on cost,” he
says. “If we were going to use MySQL
as a database platform, we would
have had to buy a much larger farm
of servers to support our application
requirement.”
After narrowing the pool, Zillow
performed a series of side-by-side
benchmarking tests. “We say that
SQL Server 2000 significantly
outperformed MySQL—by orders of
magnitude,” says Butcher.
“Performing identical Zillow-type
query benchmarks on identical
hardware and data volumes ‘out of
the box,’ we found SQL Server 2005
was 40 percent faster with query
response times than SQL Server 2000.
And SQL Server 2005 was more than
 200 percent faster with query
response times than MySQL.”
The company implemented SQL
Server 2005 Enterprise Edition in
November 2005. Soon after, it began
seeking a separate backup and
recovery product that could help it to
significantly compress the size of
backup files. Some Zillow employees
had previous experience with a
product called LiteSpeed for SQL
Server by Quest Software. Designed
specifically for SQL Server, the
product significantly compresses
“Providing rapid backup file sizes and reduces backup
responses to and recovery time. Soon, the
company began testing LiteSpeed for
queries…Delivering SQL Server. “On average, the
accurate details LiteSpeed backup files are about 50
percent of the size of the native SQL
about properties is Server backups,” says Butcher. “And,
critical. SQL Server LiteSpeed performs backups and
recoveries in just half the time.”
2005 is paramount
to the success of In February 2006, Zillow opened its
Web site to the public, and within
our entire three weeks the site had received 2.8
application.” million unique visitors, according to
comScore —placing it solidly within
Mark Butcher, Database Manager, the top-10 real estate Web sites. “Our
Zillow.com Web site was just completely
inundated—we had more traffic than
we had ever anticipated,” he says. “It
was a good problem to have.” In fact,
the site had to turn away some
visitors on launch day due to the
crush of traffic. “It’s nice to know that
it was not the databases that were
having the problem—it was our
infrastructure that needed to be
addressed,” he says. “SQL Server and
our capacity plan were able to easily
sustain the load that was there.”
Data Backups
The total amount of data stored
across the Zillow databases—
including its production, test, and
stress environments—is about 40
terabytes (TB). The company expects
this number to at least double within
a year.
Zillow performs full backups to disk at
least once daily. “We have multiple
copies of our online data sets. In
some cases, where we have
transactional data, we do transaction
log backups frequently, as much as
every minute, so we preserve every
customer transaction,” says Butcher.
The company also writes full backups
to tape, at varying times. “The end
result is that we have data protection
and recoverability from local disk and
from network attached storage, and
in the event of a data center disaster,
we have copies offsite and on tape.”
SQL Server 2005 Features
One new feature the company
depends on is data partitioning.
“Without data partitioning, we would
not be able to manage the volume of
data that we have,” says Butcher.
Indeed, sheer data volume is the
biggest challenge the company faces.
“We have one table with seven billion
records in it,” says Gary Johnson,
Senior Database Developer at Zillow.
“The table is a history table that
contains approximately one record
per property, per day for our
valuation calculations for the last 10
years—that is how we can build that
wonderful graph on the value of your
home over time.” The table grows
daily by the number of properties.
“The data partitioning feature has
made selecting data out of this table
extremely fast.”

"The solution
translates easily to
U.S.$200,000 plus in
real dollars saved."
Mark Butcher, Database Manager,
Zillow.com
With integration services, Zillow can
move data from one environment to
another more efficiently. “We have
found integration services to be much
more effective in moving the volume
of data that we have compared with
replication or any other method,”
says Butcher.
Data-mining features are used in
property valuations—known as
Zestimate™ values on Zillow. “We do
a lot of data mining to calculate the
Zestimates for properties. We use it
for trending across those calculations
to see the variants from one period of
time to another,” says Butcher.
Company data shows that a majority
of Zestimates are within 10 percent of
the selling price of the home.
The company also relies on the
business intelligence analysis and
reporting services. “We keep track of
how people traverse the site; we have
a user feedback forum. A data forum
comes from the site back into our
data warehouse for a number of
measurement criteria to show us how
well we’re doing and gauging what
people are interested in—information
we can then use to design our site
better,” Butcher says.
The company looks forward to using
the new data-mirroring technologies.
“It is highly likely we’ll be using that
as another tool to ensure availability,
as well as recoverability,” says
Butcher.
Benefits
SQL Server 2005 helps Zillow.com to
store and manage its large data sets
easily and respond to customer
queries quickly. Quest LiteSpeed has
significantly improved the backup and
recovery processes, contributing to
major cost savings. The company is
confident that the solution, which is
easy to manage, will support its long-
term growth plans.
Delivers Data Quickly
“It’s important to emphasize that it’s
the performance and the performing
characteristics of SQL Server 2005
and Quest LiteSpeed that have
allowed us to ship this product,” says
Butcher. “None of the other products
we looked at would allow us to
physically create the data and deliver
it to the customer spacing site in a
timely fashion.”
“There are, of course, other pieces to
Zillow,” says Butcher. “But the data is
what our customers are here to see.
Providing rapid responses to queries
cannot be compromised. Delivering
accurate details about properties is
critical,” he says. “SQL Server 2005 is
paramount to the success of our
entire application.”
Improves Backup and Recovery
Efficiency
Quest LiteSpeed for SQL Server
compresses files to about 20 percent
of the database file size (or 50
percent of the size of native SQL
Server backups). This translates into
at least 50 percent less backup
storage required. “It also takes only
half the time to perform the backup
operations,” says Butcher. The
company can keep eight days of
backups on disk, which offers both
portability and quick restore times.
“This means we can back up our
databases in our production data
centers and copy them over WAN
links to other sites more easily. We do
this for recoverability as well as for Scales to Projected Growth
seeding our test and development As for future plans, “There are many,”
labs.” says Butcher. “Our business is just
starting to scratch the surface, and
This equates to fewer human work SQL Server 2005, with its Business
hours, less network utilization, and Intelligence Analysis Services Suite,
considerably less storage. “The will empower us in our delivery,” he
solution translates easily to U.S. says. “This is particularly true in
$200,000 plus in real dollars saved,” terms of building time sensitivity into
Butcher says. our core product, as well as delivering
information to our decision-making
Reduces Costs Substantially business units quickly.”
If the company didn’t use Quest
LiteSpeed for SQL Server, it would The amount of growth the company
have had to expand its storage expects to see “presents a number of
facilities as well as its bandwidth challenges in terms of scalability and
between these locations—greatly operability,” Butcher says. “We still
increasing total cost of ownership. believe that SQL Server 2005 is the
right product for our continued
SQL Server 2005 has saved the growth.”
company significant savings, both
through reducing the number of
servers required to support
operations, and through cost-effective
licensing. “The reduced need for
storage alone has paid for the
licensing costs over again,” says
Butcher. “The cost savings of
licensing compared to other products
we considered, products like Oracle—
it was much more cost effective for
SQL Server to be the product here.”

Is Easy to Manage
The company is able to efficiently
manage large tables and indexes
through data partitioning. Many other
features increase the productivity of
database administrators by saving
the time needed for maintenance,
configuration, and tuning. “We have
found the product very easy to
schedule, run, manage, and
troubleshoot,” says Butcher. “Support
has also been excellent from Microsoft
as well as Quest.”
For More Information
For more information about
Microsoft products and services, call
the Microsoft Sales Information
Center at (800) 426-9400. In
Canada, call the Microsoft Canada
Information Centre at (877) 568-
2495. Customers who are deaf or
hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft
text telephone (TTY/TDD) services
at (800) 892-5234 in the United
States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide
Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Quest
Software products and services, call
(949) 754-8000 or visit the Web site
at: www.quest.com
For more information about
Zillow.com products and services,
call (206) 470-7000 or visit the Web
site at: www.zillow.com
© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft is a registered
trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United
States and/or other countries. All other trademarks
are property of their respective owners.
Document published July 2006
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Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is
comprehensive, integrated data
management and analysis software
that enables organizations to reliably
manage mission-critical information
and confidently run today’s
increasingly complex business
applications. By providing high
availability, security enhancements,
and embedded reporting and data
analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps
companies gain greater insight from
their business information and
achieve faster results for a
competitive advantage. And, because
it’s part of Windows Server System,
SQL Server 2005 is designed to
integrate seamlessly with your other
server infrastructure investments.
Software and Services Partners
 Microsoft Servers  Quest
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Enterprise Edition
Third Party Software
 Quest LiteSpeed for SQL Server
Professional
−