About the Company
Mortgage Educators and Compliance (MEC) is a one-stop online resource for all things mortgage training and education-related. They offer state-specific mortgage loan originator license courses in a single package, and tailored course bundles for existing loan officers who require additional education. Training is available live and via online classes.
The Challenge
MEC’s biggest challenge has been managing its expansion. They experienced significant growth over the last few years and required systems and tools that could handle the increase in traffic and data complexity.
Some aspects of their systems and applications were not optimized for scaling. As they have grown, the native ability of the software solutions needed additional configuration and attention to continue to function correctly and achieve the required performance.
Additionally, although MEC’s hardware could handle traffic increase, they did not have in-house DBA expertise required to advise on best practices for optimized configuration and query tuning.
It was crucial that MEC implemented additional systems and applications to manage the growth in their customers and product set, and ensure that they could offer the best of breed performance required to differentiate them from their competitors.
The Solution
Percona helped MEC transition from MySQL Community to Percona Server for MySQL, a free and open source drop-in alternative. Percona then assisted them in implementing and automating Percona XtraBackup for their long-term off-site storage, immediately providing MEC with a better backup strategy. MEC was delighted to discover that backup which previously took hours was now completed in minutes.
Percona worked closely with MEC to tune server configurations to meet their specific needs and hardware. They also assisted with query diagnostics and optimization to ensure everything was performant and working correctly.
The automation and speed of Percona XtraBackup reduced the MEC errors and overheads they would have encountered in more manual backup solutions. Optimizing server configurations reduced the total number of instances needed and vastly improved individual instance performance.
Brad Haymond, System Manager at MEC, commented: “The additional tools Percona offers, such as Percona XtraBackup, are unmatched in other solutions. Moving to Percona Server for MySQL was easy to approve since the server itself is open source. It was evident from the beginning that Percona’s level of MySQL experience and expertise is very high. So, when we decided to transition to Percona Server for MySQL, consulting with Percona for our database needs was a natural choice.”
Percona’s query tuning assistance reduced some query times by 10x to 100x, or even more. When outages and urgent issues arise, Percona helps MEC isolate and resolve issues within minutes rather than hours or days. This has saved MEC thousands of dollars in sales which would have been lost if systems were offline.
As Percona software is free and open source, it allows MEC to focus their resources on resolving problems and improving their systems, rather than paying expensive software license fees.
Working With Percona
MEC has safeguarded their MySQL and MariaDB databases for many years with Percona Support. They have also used Percona Consulting for large implementation projects.
The dedicated MEC account manager is always on hand to assist with any additional needs not immediately met by the support team. The account manager and support team are available via email, chat, and phone whenever needed.
MEC singled out Percona’s technicians and engineers as being very responsive, especially in urgent situations, and always professional. Percona team members are located around the globe and speak a variety of languages, which helps with issue resolution.
Brad Haymond commented that “Percona’s expertise in everything related to MySQL is unmatched in the industry. It is obvious Percona employees’ interests extend to hardware, OS, and other related areas. While these may not be included explicitly in official support, they inform and elevate the ability of Percona to diagnose and resolve issues that arise.”
