Vyking Accelerates Analytics with Oracle HeatWave

Why milliseconds matter

An iGaming platform operates at a pace where thousands of transactions are processed every second. Bets are placed, outcomes are calculated, balances are updated, and sessions start and end continuously. Every interaction generates data, and that data only holds its full value at the moment it is created. Players expect instant feedback as a baseline, and even a short delay can disrupt the experience. At the same time, operators rely on that same immediacy, needing real-time visibility into activity, risk, performance, and player behaviour as it happens.

Traditional reporting models built around batch processing and overnight jobs were never designed for this environment. By the time insights are available, the opportunity to act has already passed. At Vyking, we take a different approach. Our platform is built around real-time data as a core capability from the ground up, not as something added later.

As the platform has evolved, each stage of 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.

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

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

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 decisions. Choosing HeatWave was not about chasing the newest tool, but about what it enables us to do. Our teams can make decisions based on what is happening right now, not what happened hours ago. The platform can scale without constant rework of the data architecture. Compliance and responsible gaming capabilities can operate at the speed the regulatory environment now demands. And our engineers and analysts can focus on solving meaningful problems instead of maintaining fragile pipelines.

At Vyking, the quality of a platform is defined as much by what sits behind it as by what players see. The infrastructure we build, the tools we choose, and how quickly we can act on our data all shape the experience we deliver. Real-time analytics on real operational data, without compromise, is the standard we set for ourselves. More importantly, it gives us the confidence to keep pushing further and asking bigger questions of our data.

That is what makes working here so interesting. Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to work alongside highly skilled engineers on problems that genuinely challenge how you think about systems, performance, and scale. If you enjoy pushing systems to their limits and building things designed to last, it is the kind of environment where that mindset fits.