It’s no secret that e-commerce is growing as shoppers increasingly take to the Web to buy everything from clothing and personal care items to computers and school supplies. In fact, sales reached $200 billion in 2013, and six percent of all sales in the United States are now made online. In the thick of this are midsize retailers, who are very interested in ways they can grow their market share and effectively compete against larger companies.

Many are turning to big data and real-time analytics to help them better understand their target market and pinpoint trends that may help generate additional sales. However, if they’re relying on SQL to manage their database, many will find it just can’t scale at the same pace their data is growing. While SQL parses their data in a way that makes perfect sense for e-commerce businesses, it wasn’t built with today’s big data requirements in mind.

However, SQL has many additional benefits, and number one is ubiquity. SQL continues to be the go-to query language for relational database management systems, and it’s in use in thousands of applications, including ERP and CRM systems, e-commerce applications, personalized marketing apps, and custom-built apps and more. But how can online retail businesses take advantage of SQL’s ubiquity and ease of use, yet still process the volume of data they need to analyze sales and buying trends, and make informed decisions that impact the growth of their business?

Enter NewSQL, a new type of relational database that uses SQL as the query language but provides the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems. NewSQL brings the benefits of the relational paradigm to distributed architectures, providing such a high level of performance that horizontal scalability is less of a requirement. NewSQL also guarantees ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) transactions, which is critical in an ecommerce environment.

Because of its real-time scalability and analytics capabilities, ClustrixDB is emerging as the NewSQL database of choice. With ClustrixDB in place, e-commerce businesses have the scalability they need to analyze data and make decisions such as what:

• Sales channels to invest in based on past performance
• Year-long revenue will look like based on sales during the holiday period
• Additional product recommendations should be made to shoppers based on items they searched for or placed in their cart

ClustrixDB is making it easier than ever for e-commerce businesses to use real-time analytics to grow their business. Learn more about how e-commerce companies are flexibly scaling to handle peak loads and running real-time analytics to maximize revenue.