1. Worldspan The travel challenge October 20, 2006

2. Worldspan, Is not a household name and we mean it!
Think travel
Shopping
Expedia, Orbitz, PriceLine, and many more including your local travel agent
Passenger Handling
Booking, seat assignment, baggage handling, meals, etc.
Airport Systems
Crew operation, equipment operation, inventory management, billing, etc.. 2

3. Travel Shopping A Case Study
DL alone has about 4 Million Fares at any point of time
Each Fare has dozens of rules
A total 540 airlines in the Worldspan system including both International and domestic carriers
Worldwide currencies and taxes
Fares are updated 8 times a day
Inventory changes continuously
Do you see the problem? 3

4. The problem! Thirty years worth of code mainly assembler on Mainframe
Hyper application, shopping is multiple applications in one
10% of the entries represent 80% of the MIPS (system resources)
Internet, the equalizer and explosion of cost 4

5. The solution – Installment 1
To move the application from Mainframe to server we had to find a solution that adhere to the following constraints: 1) Use commodity servers
2) Achieve response time comparable to Mainframe response time
3) 24/7 availability
4) Accept and process all updates within SLAs
How we did it?
1) All data is preprocessed into a relational flat files,16 GB for Fares alone and at least another 3 GB of auxiliary data
2) Transfer all the data to all the servers (1,200 of them)
Challenges:
1) Preprocessing time
2) New data impact
3) Cold server phenomena 5

6. The solution – Installment 2
Using a real database on the cheap!
Response time is a major concern
Low cost is essential
Solution: working with GT, 98% of the right data has to be local all the time
Understanding relationships: traffic, geography, data utilization
Understanding and proactively handling capacity needs
Transferring only updated required data
Do you know what will be installment three?
Reverse engineering! 6

7. Thoughts and conclusions!
Cost, cost and then cost!
Constraints is a part of any problem solving process!
There is no one big bang, it comes in pieces!
There is always a place for Academia but we need to learn to work together! 7

8. Q/A?
I have a few minutes for questions if there are any.