Trendyol, the largest e-commerce platform in Turkey, has been a loyal user of public database company Couchbase Inc. for several years.

Originally, using a legacy database, the platform decided to migrate to accommodate an efficient recommendation domain that would recommend various products to shoppers, with the help of Couchbase. Tackling this migration was no easy task, with the website containing a huge cache of data in their relational database.

“The main reason we switched is that there are so many products coming new in Trendyol, and many of them are being sold out,” said Emre Tanriverdi (pictured, right), software engineer at Trendyol. “After switching, we had improvements in response time and high rate throughput.”

Tanriverdi and Fatih Yilmaz (pictured, left), software engineer at Trendyol, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Couchbase ConnectONLINE event. They discussed Trendyol’s migration from a legacy database, improvements noticed since their migration, plans for the future and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Starting from scratch

Migrating from relational database management system is a notoriously difficult task, requiring functionality synchronization and new code.

“We were keeping the legacy API open that the clients were still coming there for. And, to be honest, there were lots of lags on that,” Tanriverdi said. “We made a new API that connects to Couchbase, and we wanted the data science team to start feeding it. But we asked the clients to switch it in time … so we didn’t migrate any data … It was from scratch.”

For recommendation domains, the company believes it’s better to add data from scratch since they are stored in documents, Tanriverdi added.

Moving forward Trendyol sees its modernization efforts involving cross-cluster replication.

“All our products are deployed in different clusters and different geographical locations,” Yilmaz said. “We try to always use modern products and try to avoid all relational databases, especially for our discovery tribe.”

The bottom line: Modernization keeps customers happier, reducing glitches otherwise experienced when using their platform, Yilmaz concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Couchbase ConnectONLINE event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Couchbase ConnectONLINE event. Neither Couchbase Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Fatih Yilmaz/Emre Tanrıverdi