MemSQL Powers True Digital Group’s Effort to Flatten the Curve of COVID-19

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 10, 2020 — MemSQL, the Database of Now for operational analytics and cloud-native applications, announced that it is enabling in-the-moment analytics for a contact tracing app from True Digital Group Co., Ltd. (True Digital Group), the digital arm of True Corporation Public Company Limited, Thailand’s leading telecommunication company.

The web portal aims to prevent COVID-19 spread in Thailand by using anonymized cell phone location data on 500,000 location events every second for over 30 million mobile phones to track population movement in two-minute intervals. This vast amount of real-time, geospatial data provides a view of population densities enabling the Thai government authorities to see when large gatherings are forming and quickly helps them to adapt their policies.

“With the capabilities that we have at hand, we could not stand idly by in this situation,” said Bernd Sven Vindevogel, chief analytics officer at True Digital Group. “We took it as our responsibility as a member of the society to offer our help, and with our digital capabilities as a digital transformation enabler, we revisited our analytics solutions and chose to repurpose them to fit the situation while making sure that the data used in the process will always remain safe and anonymized. Due to the urgency of the pandemic and the amount of data needed, we chose MemSQL as our partner to help and make sure that our solution is always going to give an accurate and real-time result that will save lives and prevent any further development of the pandemic.”

The Challenge

Prior to this pandemic, True Digital Group’s analytics team was already leading in the analytics space for telco, with the successful deployment of a platform able to crunch trillions of relevant customer data points like location, browsing etc. True Digital Group’s Analytics team successfully launched location services based on this, for example, to optimize retail branch locations. The computation strategy was to land data in Hadoop, then run map-reduce operations on the data on a scheduled batch basis every 24 hours to create the aggregates and derived data. However, the tool was designed to operate in batch mode and did not require a real-time result.

Then the pandemic hit, which changed everything. Now, the need changed from a “delayed-data-is-good-enough” mindset to an “in-the-moment, analytics with an SLA” mindset, as every second means increased potential for new cases. In order for the project to produce a meaningful result, the data process needs to be precise, accurate, and lightning fast.

The Solution

Given how quickly the coronavirus was spreading, True Digital Group’s analytics team evaluated its options and went directly to MemSQL. It is known that MemSQL has a reputation for speed, scale and structured query language (SQL).

For fast-changing data, the response time of the backend database is a crucial component in ensuring a fast user experience. Based on its expertise in this space, True Digital Group identified MemSQL as being uniquely suited to these types of workloads, which require scaling to address the addition of new data and entail highly-concurrent lookup queries as well as complex analytic queries at speed.

MemSQL supports more than a trillion rows per second on raw data and comfortably handles the ingestion of 500,000 events per second.

The Result

The first functional version of the True Digital Group COVID-19 spread prevention web-portal was built in under two weeks. The web portal uses React and Web Workers in the frontend and MemSQL Pipelines and time series functions processing on the backend. The MemSQL technology allows for fast ingestion of events and geospatial functions used to plot data on the map in real time.

“We are living in unprecedented times. The solutions that are needed going forward will have to be radically different as the need for speed, scale and rapid deployment on commodity hardware will be essential. We are thankful to all the data architects and developers at True Digital Group who worked on this project and we are humbled to have contributed to their efforts through our technology for this worthy cause. We look forward to meeting them in person sometime soon,” said MemSQL Co-CEO Raj Verma.

True Digital Group and its partners continue to iterate on the app to demonstrate new possibilities for its use by Thai government authorities for analysis. Read the full case study here.

About MemSQL

MemSQL is The Database of Now, powering modern applications and analytical systems with a cloud-native, massively scalable architecture. MemSQL delivers maximum ingest, accelerated transaction processing and blisteringly fast query performance, including AI integration and machine learning models, all at the highest concurrency. Global enterprises use the MemSQL distributed database to easily ingest, process, analyze and act on data, to thrive in today’s insight-driven economy. MemSQL is optimized to run on any public cloud or on premises with commodity hardware. Visit www.memsql.com or follow us @memsql.

About True Digital Group

True Digital Group is one of the core businesses of True Group, Thailand’s fully-integrated telecommunications, and digital service providers. Aiming to become the ultimate digital enabler in Southeast Asia, True Digital Group continuously expands its ecosystem to deliver a portfolio of high-quality digital services to customers. True Digital Group’s key businesses include Digital Media, O2O and Privilege, Data Analytics, IoT and Digital Solutions, as well as True Digital Academy. True Digital Group has built deep competences in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics. With this, True Digital Group is able to build a unique ecosystem of digital platforms and solutions, addressing the digital needs of consumers, merchants, and enterprises. True Digital Group also launched its regional operations across Southeast Asia, with Indonesia and the Philippines as its first two markets. For more information, please visit www.truedigital.com. Contact: [email protected]

Source: MemSQL