MySQL Measures Success for Cross Media

Cross Media Marketing Corp. (Amex: XMM) is a leading technology-driven marketing company that utilizes targeted direct marketing channels such as email, voice and direct mail to reach an expanding U.S. consumer base of 30 million. Cross Media places millions of phone calls every year, selling a variety of products, from magazine subscriptions to membership clubs, and it has chosen the MySQL database to perform the critical job tracking all these calls for success measurement and cost management.

"Naturally, we spend a lot of money on long-distance phone services, and we wanted to ensure that we are spending that money wisely," said Christopher Thompson, CTO at Cross Media. "We needed a system that would allow us to determine the success of marketing campaigns based upon 800 number and call duration. Having this capability was important because we needed a way to accurately track and compensate our strategic partners based on carrier-generated call detail records. We knew the solution had to be fast, reliable, and easy to manage."

To address these issues, Cross Media designed a system that retrieves large call detail files (1-5 MB), extracts and manipulates the data, then stores it in a MySQL database. Cross Media chose Perl and the MySQL DBI drivers because of their wide industry adoption. Adhoc querying capabilities were later added using PHP, a popular open source scripting language that tightly integrates with the Apache web server.

"The MySQL-based system has proven to be very fast, reliable and easy to administer," commented Thompson. "The database has been up for 260 days straight and has answered over 14 million queries. We have also deployed an open source tool called phpMyAdmin that lets one of our project managers perform simple database administration tasks with relative ease."

Cross Media's MySQL application runs on the Linux operating system on Penguin Computing hardware. It holds 20 tables and has seven million records in the largest table.

"We looked at other proprietary databases to support this application, but we saved a lot of money and engineering resources by going the MySQL route. And we've really benefited from the open source support by way of Perl DBI and PHP. Cross Media will continue to use MySQL, both for off-the-shelf and proprietary applications where performance, reliability and time-to-market are critical," noted Thompson.