La Poste, the French Post Office, process 50,000,000 items of mail per day with each item producing multiple footprints. This data is stored in a database that allows for efficient organization and routing of mail, ensuring delivery to the correct address. La Poste faced the challenge of how to centralize this data whilst still being able to get real time access to routing and delivery statistics.

Traditional OLTP oriented databases alone did not provide the solution. Working with SkySQL, La Poste implemented a hybrid solution that was deployed using MySQL and a columnar data store based on the MySQL core (InfiniDB). This is the case study presentation will cover how using this agile methodology, a working solution based on MySQL and InfiniDB was created for this big data challenge. We will explore some of the key issues that had to be resolved to bring performance times down from over several minutes to mere seconds.