Why ad platforms run six databases to answer one question

Ad platforms often suffer from "data sprawl," a complex and inefficient architecture resulting from the accumulation of various specialized systems intended to address distinct, low-latency, and real-time needs that traditional OLAP and OLTP systems can't meet. This sprawl emerges as events are duplicated and modified across multiple systems, creating redundancy and driving up operational costs. The industry's shift towards real-time Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) systems aims to consolidate these workloads by allowing both transactional writes and analytical reads on the same data, eliminating the need for separate systems and reducing delays. Despite the apparent efficiency of individual components, the true cost of sprawl lies in the integration points, leading to hidden structural inefficiencies and challenges in data governance and trust. To address these issues, platforms are encouraged to incrementally transition to unified systems that can manage diverse workloads without sacrificing data freshness, thereby creating a balanced ecosystem that optimizes both historical archives and latency-sensitive, customer-facing tasks.

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