Rakuten Advertising Services Modernization Case Study

This case study details Rakuten's modernization of its advertising services through the implementation of Couchbase's NoSQL database. Faced with challenges from a legacy Oracle RDBMS platform, which limited scalability and increased costs, Rakuten sought a more efficient solution. The transition to Couchbase resulted in nearly 100% availability and a 20% reduction in total cost of ownership by consolidating multiple databases. The new system supports over 70,000 shops on the Ichiba platform, managing a catalog of over 475 million items. The case study outlines the benefits of Couchbase's architecture, including improved performance, reduced maintenance costs, and enhanced capabilities for integrating new advertisement services. It also highlights the future roadmap for further data integration and the potential migration to Couchbase Capella DBaaS on Google Cloud. Overall, the case study illustrates the significant operational improvements achieved by Rakuten through this strategic database transition.