Sheetz

Actian Helps Fast Growing US Convenience Store Chain to Save Money and Take Action on Big Data

Sheetz expects to double the amount of data it is able to analyze and act on with Vectorwise

Sheetz, one of the fastest growing U.S. convenience stores, has selected Vectorwise, the industry’s fastest data analytics engine, to optimize costs, maintain high quality and ensure a positive customer experience. As data volumes continue to grow, Sheetz has recognized that switching from a more expensive platform to Vectorwise will save them money and present new opportunities to take action on Big Data.

Sheetz is a family-owned convenience store chain based in Pennsylvania with more than 406 locations across six states. For more than fifty years, their mission has been to meet the specific needs of customers on the go. Today, life is faster and busier, and customers expect the stores to be there when they are needed the most.

In order to meet that need, Sheetz performs extensive analysis on numerous types of data from multiple sources as a way to optimize costs, maintain high quality, and ensure that the overall experience of their customers is positive and consistent. Actian’s Vectorwise enabled them to now expand that analysis from one year of data to two years (approximately three billion rows), as well as manage its anticipated growth (expected to double over the next two to three years).

The initial project was to convert a character-based reporting application built in ABF (Applications by Forms) to use Vectorwise. The required application changes were minimal and the biggest technical changes related to “singleton inserts” (row at a time data loading) and table storage structure (schema) definitions. Value is now being delivered using multiple products in the Actian portfolio, and on top of a yearly savings and the record-breaking speed of Vectorwise, the convenience store chain was surprised at the ease with which new Vectorwise functionality was added to their environment.

Vectorwise is one of the most significant database technology innovations of the last twenty years and meets broad business demands to analyze the exploding volumes of data. Since it was launched in June 2010, Vectorwise has successfully achieved performance increases in commercial deployments of 70x that of existing databases by utilizing the latent processing power in modern hardware.