Communications

Case Study:

SQL 2008 at Euro 2008

1 May 2008

Austrian Broadcasting Corporation Radio & Television (ORF) brings its audience great entertainment, including extensive winter sports coverage. But this summer the priority will be live radio and television coverage of Euro 2008, the four-yearly tournament for Europe’s top national football teams.

ORF is the Austrian national public service broadcaster. Funded from a combination of television license fees and revenue from limited on-air advertising, it is the dominant player in the Austrian broadcast media.

Looking ahead to broadcasting the 31 matches of Euro 2008, ORF was eager to enhance its IT infrastructure including a collection of data warehouses that support sport statistics and analytics. Additionally, ORF wanted to enhance its ability to encrypt data to protect operational information and to enhance its data auditing capabilities to ensure compliance with Austrian government regulations.

Processing speed is paramount at ORF IT because one of its top responsibilities is supporting on-air sportscasters and reporters in the field with split-second analytics to help television viewers and radio listeners better understand the significance of what is happening during live broadcasts

The company, having been an early adopter of SQL Server 2005 running on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system, was eager to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 to gain whatever data processing speed enhancements it could, as well as to begin benefiting from new features that would simplify overall database administration.

The greatest benefit ORF has gained from upgrading to SQL Server 2008 is that it is able to deliver information to its sportscasters and other reporters-and hence its viewers - faster than ever before.

“Everything we do is driven by the need for speed,” Gerald Schinagl, project manager and systems architect for the sports database at ORF says. “If a ski jumper has just completed an exceptional performance, our broadcasters need to know immediately what the significance of the scores mean. We do incredibly complex analytics. We do analytics in certain areas that we believe no other sports broadcaster can match.”

All work is done, though, under tremendous time pressure. “We must deliver our analytic results immediately or there is no value,” says Schinagl. “We have a saying that the information only has value in the moment an event happens. One minute later the information is worth half what it was before. Two minutes later it may well be worthless. This is why we continuously look for the fastest data warehousing and analytical solutions, and this is why we upgraded so quickly to SQL Server 2008.”

Solution execution was simplified because it was easy for ORF to upgrade its databases from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008. “We were amazed at how easy it was to upgrade,” Schinagl says. “We have a fairly complex collection of data. We have perhaps 50,000 football matches in XML, including our own data type based on using SQL CLR [common language runtime] so we were expecting some issues to arise, and none did. It worked like a breeze.”

Upgrading its database infrastructure to SQL Server 2008 is helping ORF to provide analytics and related data to its live broadcast teams even faster than it had before, which will help it to stand out in its live coverage of the Euro 2008 games. Database management has been simplified through use of the new Declarative Management Framework and Change Data Capture features of SQL Server 2008. ORF also is benefiting from enhanced data auditing capabilities, easier- to-deploy encryption, faster data loads using Star Join schemas in the data warehouse, and more efficient data modelling using Hierarchy ID.