Visma Proceedo Doubles Response Speed with MariaDB

About Visma Proceedo

Visma is a leading provider of mission-critical cloud software helping its 1.4 million customers across Europe and Latin America simplify and automate their business work.

Visma Proceedo is a large purchase-to-pay cloud solution helping businesses automate their entire purchasing process from order to payment. It is a critical application in the Nordic region with almost one million users, processing 12 million invoices yearly. It’s a system that requires zero downtime, no performance issues or data corruption with over 20TB of data.

The Challenge

Visma was hitting limitations with the current legacy relational database it was using and realized it was going to cost more money if it continued.

The reasons for the database switch included:

• Visma’s continuous delivery implementation was prevented because the team wasn’t able to use local databases for its developers
• Part of Proceedo’s functionality was built on SQL dialect that required additional expertise to maintain
• Data encryption would require additional license costs
• In order to handle the increased data, additional hardware would need to be purchased, which would increase the license costs even more
• The license cost was already too big

The Solution

Visma started the process of migrating to MariaDB Enterprise Server and leaving a legacy proprietary database after over 20 years. Visma started its migration project in May 2018 and completed the migration in September 2020.

The project goal was to have Proceedo use MariaDB as a backend relational database on production for all customers with at least the same performance as in the previous database and no data loss.

The Impact

Once Visma was in production and Proceedo was optimized for its users, average response time improved significantly. With the previous proprietary database, it was 1.5 to 2 seconds, whereas with MariaDB it was under 700 milliseconds.

Visma also saved roughly 10% per year for license and support. By moving to MariaDB, Visma has been able to decrease costs and upgrade hardware as necessary while making improvements such as using replicas for reports generation, local machines, etc. Visma has also been able to add more storage to handle increases in its data, which doubled over two years.

Advice for Migrating Off a Proprietary Database

Visma’s top 3 pieces of advice are to make sure you have the correct project goal, a thoughtful project scope, and know what the rollout would look like including downtime requirements as well as build in sufficient time for various testing (regression, performance, load, security and disaster recovery). Visma’s project was much bigger than the team realized, which created some delays, but it was well worth it.