Previously, LandAmerica was using large UNIX-based computers from Sun and HP as well as a costly Oracle database; today, it relies on eight PowerEdge server computers from Dell running the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, both part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. “It is significantly less costly for us to maintain the hardware and software components of this solution,” says Brauer. “I would say that our costs are only 60 percent of what they were before—primarily because of server and software licensing costs.”

Affinity Systems, a Microsoft® Certified Partner, developed a system for Brandimensions that monitors the Internet to track and help protect brands. Rather than using an Oracle database, the solution relies on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. the Brandimensions database holds approximately 64 billion links mapped for 8 billion URLs and 210 million Web sites—more than 8 terabytes of data. It maintains 7,000-10,000 transactions per second and crawls 750 million Web pages each month. The solution is designed to crawl up to 2 billion sites per month with minimal cost increases and no software changes.

When the company began building the database in 2005, the challenge was to find a product that could easily handle its very large data sets and deliver quick responses to user queries. The company considered MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server (2000 and 2005). After evaluating several database products, the company implemented Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition, which performed between 40 to 200 percent faster than its closest competitors.