Vyking Accelerates Analytics with Oracle HeatWave

Why milliseconds matter in iGaming

An iGaming platform operates at a pace where thousands of transactions are processed every second with bets placed, outcomes calculated, balances updated, sessions started and ended. Every interaction generates data, and every piece of data has value in the moment it’s created. Players expect instant feedback as a baseline. A delay of even a few seconds can break the experience. On the other side of the platform, operators need that same immediacy and a requirement for real-time visibility into activity, risk, performance, and player behaviour as it unfolds.

Traditional reporting models, built around batch processing and overnight jobs, weren’t designed for this environment. By the time insights arrive, the moment to act on them has already passed. At Vyking, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve built our platform around real-time data as a first principle and not as an enhancement layer added later, but as a core capability.

Every stage of our growth has required us to rethink how we handle data. This post focuses on one of the most important steps in that journey: how Oracle HeatWave became the foundation for delivering real-time analytics at scale.

So, it’s been a really enjoyable first year at Vyking. Over the past 12 months, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside highly skilled engineers while tackling problems that genuinely challenge how I think about software development. If you enjoy pushing systems to their limits, optimising performance, and building things that are designed to last, this is exactly the kind of environment where that mindset thrives.

The challenge: OLTP databases weren't designed for analytics

Our transactional backbone runs on MySQL, and for good reason. It handles our core operations reliably — player accounts, wallets, bet settlements, payment processing. For transactional workloads, it performs exactly as expected. But analytical workloads are a different problem entirely. The moment our business analysts or operations teams wanted to run aggregations across millions of rows — calculating monthly GGR, tracking signups and first-time deposits, analysing player behaviour across product categories — query times stretched from seconds into minutes. A single GGR calculation over a year's worth of raw data could take well over a minute to complete on our InnoDB engine.

 The conventional solution would be to spin up a separate data warehouse, build ETL pipelines, and ship the data over on a schedule. That approach works, but it comes with real costs: additional infrastructure to maintain, duplicated data, and most importantly, time to implement and maintain.

Why we chose Oracle HeatWave

Oracle HeatWave offered something genuinely different: an in-memory query accelerator that runs directly on our MySQL data, with no ETL pipeline required. Analytical queries are automatically routed to the HeatWave engine, while transactional workloads continue hitting InnoDB exactly as before. One database, one source of truth, two engines working in parallel. For a platform team, this changes the calculus entirely. We didn't have to choose between operational reliability and analytical performance. We didn't have to build and maintain synchronization pipelines. We didn't have to worry about data inconsistencies between systems. The data our dashboards query is the same data our platform writes, at the same moment it's written. 

This was the innovation that fit our philosophy: reduce moving parts, keep the architecture clean, and let the technology do the heavy lifting.

How we use HeatWave at Vyking

One thing that stands out at Vyking is the approach to engineering. There is no pressure to rush features just to ship quickly. The focus is on building and developing things properly. That means correctness, performance, and long term quality are always prioritised.

The bonus engine upgrade is a good example of this. It is one of the most complex systems I have worked on, not just in terms of logic, but also in ensuring stability under real world conditions. Seeing it come together as a near complete platform feature has been a great experience. At this level, even small improvements can have a meaningful impact. Better performance improves the user experience, reduces infrastructure costs, and makes the entire platform more scalable.

HeatWave has become a foundational layer for several critical areas of our operation:

• Real-time player activity monitoring. Our operations teams have live visibility into what's happening across the platform at any moment — which games are being played, where betting volume is concentrating, how sessions are trending. This isn't a dashboard that refreshes every fifteen minutes. It's a live pulse of the business.

• Responsible gaming alerts.This is an area where speed genuinely matters. Being able to detect behavioural patterns that warrant intervention — in real time rather than retrospectively — means we can act when it matters most. HeatWave gives our responsible gaming systems the analytical speed they need to process these signals at the pace players generate them.

•  Game performance analytics. Our product and commercial teams need to understand which games are performing, which are underperforming, and how player engagement is evolving across our catalogue. With HeatWave, these questions can be answered on demand, across any time window, without waiting for overnight jobs.

•  Financial reporting. GGR calculations, player segmentation by revenue, cohort analysis, jackpot contributions — the kind of queries that used to be overnight batch jobs now run interactively. Finance teams can explore the numbers the way analysts naturally want to: iteratively, following the thread wherever it leads.

A lot of my growth over the past year has come from working on problems you simply do not encounter in smaller scale systems. When you are dealing with performance at scale, you need to think differently. Monitoring, observability, and recovery become just as important as the feature itself. Making sure systems behave correctly under load and can recover when something goes wrong has significantly sharpened how I approach development. I have also become more detail oriented. It is no longer about making something work, but about making sure it works in all scenarios, under real conditions, and over time. 

The Results

The performance gains have been substantial, and they grow more pronounced as our data volume grows. A representative example: one of our core GGR aggregation queries, which calculates annual revenue from raw hourly statistics across our entire player base, executes in 0.345 seconds on HeatWave compared to roughly 75 seconds on InnoDB — a speedup of more than 200x. Other analytical queries show similar patterns: a 35-second query dropping to 131 milliseconds, sub-second queries accelerating by 2–3x.

The most important insight isn't any single benchmark, though. It's the pattern: the larger the dataset, the wider the performance gap becomes. This matters enormously for a growing platform. As our player base expands and our historical data accumulates, traditional analytical performance tends to degrade. With HeatWave, it remains fast.

What this means for Vyking

Technology choices are ultimately business choices. Choosing HeatWave wasn't about chasing the newest tool, it was about what it enables us to do. It means our teams can make decisions based on what's happening right now, not what happened last night. It means our platform can scale without demanding a redesign of our data architecture every time we hit a new threshold. It means our compliance and responsible gaming capabilities operate at the speed the regulatory environment increasingly expects. And it means our engineers and analysts spend their time solving interesting problems, not maintaining brittle pipelines.

At Vyking, we believe the quality of a platform is defined as much by the decisions invisible to the player as by the experience they see. The infrastructure we build, the tools we choose, and the speed at which we can respond to what our data is telling us — these are the foundations of a platform built to last in a demanding industry. Real-time analytics on real operational data, with no compromises. That's the standard we've set for ourselves. The real win: HeatWave gave us the foundation and the confidence to ask bigger questions about our data.