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January 12, 2023

Entain bets on SQL Server 2022 to boost growing gaming business

Entain is a leader in sports betting, gaming, and interactive entertainment. Through a cutting-edge technology platform, they provide exciting and safe gaming experiences to millions of customers across five continents. Customers expect to place wagers and receive payouts quickly and securely 24/7/365 across 33 languages and 42 currencies, no matter how many events are happening simultaneously.

Entain

Given the fast-paced, always-on nature of Entain’s business, transactional speed and system availability are critical. There is literally no maintenance window when the system can be down; in fact, the engineering team responsible for online transaction processing (OLTP) must report any failover that takes more than 30 seconds. “Processing must be fast, and all databases must be fully available,” said Miloš Radivojević, Head of MSSQL Database Engineering at Entain.

Entain relies on Microsoft SQL Server as its data platform. Currently, the company uses SQL Server 2019, but it recently launched a test of SQL Server 2022.

“SQL Server 2022 has a set of features that can make our life easier and our system even more stable. It’s everything from high-speed failover, backup and restore processes to improving query performance without changing code.”

Miloš Radivojević, Head of MSSQL Database Engineering, Entain

Better, faster failover and greater availability with SQL Server 2022

One of the new features Entain has tested is contained availability groups. This feature makes it possible to put all databases, user logins, permissions, and scheduled jobs related to different business functions or applications inside one availability group environment. As a result, there’s no need to worry about missing logins or missing jobs during a failover. Contained availability groups also help in case of hardware upgrade or moving databases from server to server for scalability reasons. Since a contained availability group has its own master and msdb, all the user logins, permissions, and SQL jobs are automatically migrated.

“With contained availability groups, we see the potential for fewer incidents, fewer issues with migration.”

Miloš Radivojević, Head of MSSQL Database Engineering, Entain

Entain is also looking closely at Buffer Pool Parallel Scan, which improves the scalability of several common scenarios in SQL Server, including Always On failover events and backup/restore operations. Multiple CPU cores scan the buffer pool in parallel, rather than in a serial operation, resulting in 10-30x improvement in executions. In addition, enhancements to the Always On availability groups feature and Accelerated Database Recovery in SQL Server 2022 help improve the failover experience and facilitate recovery efforts. Finally, by using QuickAssist Technology (QAT) for SQL Server Entain expects to reduce the size and improve the speed of database backups. Our current tests with QAT drivers and QATzip library shows about 25% saving for both parameters.

“Anything that can speed up failover is helpful to us. Even fractional improvements make a difference, and I expect that Buffer Pool Parallel Scan will help us meet and exceed our high availability goals.”

Miloš Radivojević, Head of MSSQL Database Engineering, Entain

Improved performance with less risk

Query Store hints is another SQL Server 2022 feature that Radivojević described as one of the most useful SQL Server 2022 features, particularly given Entain’s 24/7 operations. This feature makes it possible to shape query plans without changing code.

“With Query Store hints, we can make changes that have no detrimental impact on performance without touching the application code. This is extremely useful in situations when a critical part of the code is affected at weekends or during non-working hours. Changing application code introduces risk and requires several approvals. By using Query Store hints, we can reduce processes, save costs, and reduce potential risk.”

Miloš Radivojević, Head of MSSQL Database Engineering, Entain

In addition, SQL Server 2022 introduces a handful of new members to the Intelligent Query Processing family. Of particular interest to Entain is cardinality estimation (CE) feedback, which automatically chooses the best CE model available for each query in the workload, saving the team the time required for manual intervention. In a growing business, the amount and distribution of data is not always predictable, which is a challenge for good query performance. In a large environment, there will always be queries that work better under some old assumptions or rules, and CE feedback can be of great help there. “In an environment with a lot of servers and a huge database, each feature that can improve performance or fix performance issues automatically or without touching the code is very valuable,” Radivojević said.

The Entain team also noted that SQL Server 2022 includes database engine improvements, including those related to tempdb contention that help improve scalability. SQL Server 2022 allows concurrent updates to the global allocation map (GAM) and shared global allocation map (SGAM) under a shared latch rather than an update latch. This improvement eliminates nearly all tempdb contention by allowing GAM and SGAM pages to be modified in parallel. The tempdb database is critical to SQL Server performance, and the upgrades included in SQL Server 2022 make it virtually “hands free.” Buffer Pool Parallel Scan and the improvements to tempdb are on by default—customers can obtain next-level scalability simply by migrating to SQL Server 2022.

Planning for an upgrade

Based on their experience with SQL Server 2022 so far, the Entain team plans to begin the upgrade process in early 2023 following the FIFA World Cup. 

As the new version is officially released, Entain will educate its teams on how to use new features, starting with Intelligent Query Processing and Transact-SQL enhancements.

Exploring the cloud with the help of Microsoft Azure

In addition to testing SQL Server 2022, Entain has been exploring other Microsoft products as the company considers testing relevant Azure services that can run in their datacenters. “We never sit still and are always keen to learn how we can stay ahead of our competition,” explained Radivojević. “Our infrastructure is predominantly on-premises, but we have big plans with cloud computing and services. Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL and AKS on HCI are our natural companions on this journey.

As part of this process, the Entain team is exploring Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI to run and manage containerized applications and databases in Kubernetes on-premises. By Arc-enabling their infrastructure in their datacenter, Entain can run Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance in containers as the database for its containerized applications with AKS on Azure Stack HCI as the managed Kubernetes service. “AKS makes it super flexible for us to move ahead from classic IT with VMs to cloud native computing with Kubernetes clusters on-premises,” said Georg Stoifl, Lead Software Engineer at Entain. “With Azure Hybrid Benefit for AKS enabled it allows us to re-use existing hardware and licenses of Hyper-V VM hosts for on premise Kubernetes clusters. Azure Arc makes cluster lifecycle and permissions easy to manage. The biggest benefit is that we can bring up environments faster and have a higher level of automation by default, allowing us to ship more quickly and eventually enabling greater production.” AKS on Azure Stack HCI is connected to Azure through Azure Arc, enabling Entain to deploy cloud native applications hybrid - to the cloud and to datacenters or edge locations. 

Finally, Entain is considering Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance. This service allows SQL Server users to utilize cloud-native capabilities and a flexible consumption model. With Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance, all data remains on-premises, thus helping Entain meet its data sovereignty regulations. In addition, Entain is looking at using cloud-connected features in SQL Server 2022 such as Link feature for Azure SQL Managed Instance for hybrid flexibility and database mobility, as well as Azure Synapse Link for near real-time analytics over its operational data.

Customers are the focus of everything that Entain does. They listen and respond to their needs; continuously innovating, introducing new products, and creating a personalized experience.  Microsoft helps enable that through its cutting-edge technology service. 

Working with Microsoft, the company is well positioned to meet its ambition to be the world’s leader in sports betting and gaming entertainment and deliver for the customers at every moment.

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