At a glance
VinAudit offers thorough vehicle history data, market data, and listings for pre-owned cars, serving customers in the US and Canada.
SQLite couldn’t scale for their expanding vehicle data app, prompting VinAudit to implement complex sharding across multiple systems.
VinAudit migrated to the open-source YugabyteDB database for its horizontal scale, PostgreSQL compatibility, and strong community support.
VinAudit Migrates from SQLite to Boost Speed and Scale to Support Rapidly Growing Customer Base
VinAudit offers comprehensive vehicle data from the most authoritative sources, enabling dealerships and customers in the United States and Canada to make informed decisions with access to vehicle history reports, active listings, and market values. The company continually aggregates data from government agencies, non-profit organizations, and industry partners. Storing and supplying timely and accurate data is critical to their business.
Their client base has grown quickly, stressing their SQLite-based system’s ability to scale. This, along with a user base spread across North America, resulted in degraded performance and poor user experiences.
To address this issue with their existing solution, VinAudit had to manually shard their data across multiple systems—an operationally costly, time-consuming process that increased the risk of errors. The team soon recognized this approach was unsustainable and decided to find a more effective solution.
Challenges
VinAudit realized that their existing SQLite environment could not easily scale or protect their critical vehicle data. The main challenges with the legacy system included:
- Inadequate Scalability: The SQLite-based system failed to support business growth and an increasing client base. VinAudit needed a system that could scale horizontally to handle more data and users.
- Expensive Sharding: Manually performing client-side and app-side sharding was cumbersome and costly. Copying the database across multiple systems was unsustainable and drove up operational costs without significant benefits.
- Limited Feature Set: To decouple read and write workloads, VinAudit needed advanced features like follower reads, which were either unavailable or behind a paywall for other database offerings.
- Migration Complexity: Many modern solutions did not offer a suitable tool for migrating data from an on-premises environment to a cloud-based solution.
- Partially Open Source: While investigating replacement solutions, the team found that some databases were only partially open source, often hiding key features needed for their testing in expensive enterprise editions.
Key Database Requirements
VinAudit needed a distributed database to eliminate the complex app- and client-side sharding needed for their SQLite environment. Their selection requirements for the new database included:
- Horizontal scalability: Ability to scale both up and down as necessary, starting from a small base.
- Strong PostgreSQL compatibility: Essential to decrease time to market and leverage the team’s existing database knowledge and experience.
- Commitment to open source: Should be a fully open-source solution (no paywalls) with comprehensive community support, offering all core features.
- Global design patterns: Must support multi-region configurations and follower reads for low-latency access by a geographically distributed user base.
- Powerful migration tool: Tools that simplify data migration from on-premises environments to different public clouds.
- Active community support: A supportive community that provides assistance throughout the migration process.
I would absolutely recommend YugabyteDB to anyone, especially if you have a growing need for high data, high throughput, and want to deliver low latency—this is the right system for you
Rahul SureshChief Technical Officer (CTO)
Business Results
75%
decrease in data export time
$0
cost for open source solution
100%
same level of performance across multi-region deployment
Yugabyte Solution
100% open source with access to the complete set of advanced enterprise features.
Small initial footprint with seamless horizontal scalability to efficiently accomodate service.
YugabyteDB Voyager to simplify migration from SQLite and minimize application changes.
VinAudit Chooses YugabyteDB Over CockroachDB for Low-Latency Data Workloads
VinAudit highly recommends YugabyteDB for its ability to handle high data volume with high throughput and low latency, ideal for those needing a robust distributed database system across multiple regions and multiple systems. Their transition to YugabyteDB from SQLite significantly improved data export times, cutting down it from 8 hours to just 2, showcasing remarkable ROI.