GoGuardian offers more engaging, effective learning — from anywhere. The company powers K-12 digital learning environments where every student can thrive.

Challenges/Goals 

The pandemic rapidly accelerated digital learning adoption, as the US education system moved 55 million K-12 students from in-school learning to online classrooms. Essential operations such as classroom management, device inventory, content filtering, and student safety were often spread across multiple applications, increasing complexity and reducing efficiency. 

GoGuardian sought to use machine learning to offer a unified education technology platform. The platform would moderate student web activities, offer a more engaging experience, help them meet their educational goals, and keep them safe during an incredibly stressful time. GoGuardian’s priorities for the platform were: 

• Maintaining data security, fidelity, and retention
• Achieving scalability and availability to meet the needs of millions of concurrent users 
• Queryability to give users access to all the data they need to achieve educational goals. 

Technology Requirements

The digital learning environment had a number of unique requirements to meet.

GoGuardian needed a database that could manage volatile data, capture all real-time browsing events of 55 million students, and provide aggregate query support.

Data generation on its platform was cyclical since schools don't keep GoGuardian enabled when classes aren't in session. Events tracked by the software included collections of web clicks or navigation, which required multiple writes across different tables. This data is mutable, which may need an update rather than an insert.

The read query pattern was dynamic. Data was grouped, aggregated, and filtered by time, classrooms, student, school, URL, and other information. The query response time needed to be fast to deliver real-time performance and thus provide educators with important guidance and tools. 

Why SingleStore/Solution

GoGuardian tested many databases and found that SingleStore was the ideal solution for working with its incoming data and query patterns. This cloud-native unified database built for speed, scale, and agility delivered the functionality and performance needed for this robust software platform. 

The database is simple by design, with support for SQL and streamlined maintenance requirements. Developer-friendly features provide GoGuardian with a powerful, scalable, and flexible foundation to grow their platform. 

GoGuardian also found SingleStore’s support to be helpful, friendly, and responsive. The team can reach out directly to SingleStore engineers when it has questions and feature requests. This level of support made the database adoption process easier and creates a pleasant working experience. 

Outcomes 

GoGuardian is now being used in more than 10,000 schools serving more than 18 million students. Educators can focus on creating a quality online learning environment rather than struggling with software that’s not purpose-built for classroom management.

“SingleStore supports both row and columnar storage, defined at table creation time. Perhaps most importantly, it allows unions and joins across row-based and columnar tables. I cannot stress enough how important this feature is to us, as it fundamentally changed how we served data by giving us the best of both worlds: the fast writes of a row-store and the fast aggregate reads of a column store," said Jung (JK) Kim, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, GoGuardian.*

Saving $30,000/month on Database Costs

GoGuardian no longer needed to use multiple databases to meet their data storage and aggregate query requirements. The reduced infrastructure complexity significantly improved the maintainability of the database technology, requiring less hands-on time from the engineering team. They were also able to optimize data storage and queries to control expenses while delivering query response time of <30 milliseconds. SingleStore made scalability, high availability, and flexibility more cost-efficient for the platform. 

Helping 500,000 Educators Manage Digital Classrooms

GoGuardian helps more than half a million educators manage digital classrooms, and it can now offer students a more engaging experience, help them meet their educational goals, and keep them safe during an incredibly stressful time. 

Achieving Throughput of 2.49M Events/minute

GoGuardian was able to reach their real-time event processing goals through SingleStore’s ultra-fast ingest and high-performance queries. The sheer amount of data contained in the events, and the fact that it is volatile for a short period, frequently required upsert operations.

Check out this blog post: GoGuardian’s Education Technology Platform, powered by SingleStore DB, scales to serve 18+ million students

Learn more in this case study blog post: How GoGuardian stores and queries high-throughput data with SingleStore

*JK Kim is now a Cloud Engineer at Stream Native

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