People performing product searches on the Amazon.com website or mobile app represent a very specific—and valuable—category of potential customer. Because they are searching on a retail site, they are closer to the purchase decision than someone performing the same search on a general-interest web search engine.

One way that sellers can target and convert these potential customers is by using Amazon Sponsored Products Ads. To create Sponsored Products campaigns, sellers place bids on keywords related to their products for auctions executed in real time. Winning bidders’ ads appear on the page of search results matching their terms or on the detail pages of related products. Sellers pay only for the clicks their ads receive, and detailed campaign reports help them track and understand their spending and the performance of their ads.

Conversion data shows that Sponsored Products Ads are a powerful tool for new and experienced sellers alike to expand their reach, maximize their sales, and design campaigns that fit their budgets. This approach has been adopted by hundreds of thousands of sellers.

"We've seen explosive growth for Sponsored Products ever since we launched this offering,” says Samujjwal Roy, a database architect manager for Amazon Self-Service Performance Advertising (SSPA). SSPA, part of the Amazon Engineering and Development organization, is responsible for building, managing, and scaling the technologies that power advertising offerings, including Sponsored Products Ads. "We expect transaction and data volume to grow exponentially over the years."

That kind of growth is good news for the business, but it wasn't long ago when it would have raised scalability concerns. The reason: the fleet of Oracle databases that were integral to the team's offerings. "Within a few years, we would have needed to scale our pool of Oracle databases to more than 30 databases supporting billions of campaign impressions a day," says Roy. "Having to continue scaling Oracle to support that level of projected growth would have been a nightmare due to Oracle’s scalability limitations and huge maintenance burden."