ObjectStore Speeds the Tour de France to the Finish Line

ObjectStore database technology is the key component for the official Web site of the Tour de France. The 2,200-mile Tour, one of the premier sporting events in the world, is raced around the circumference of France during three weeks in July. During the race, the official Tour Web site (www.letour.com) logs more than 270 million visits, often coming in at the rate of 35,000 per minute. ObjectStore technology enables the Tour site to handle the high volume of traffic and the constant, real-time race updates and statistics that follow the daily activities of 198 riders.

The Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), the leading French sports organizer, used the ObjectStore data management solution to build a flexible, common information repository that stores, caches and serves full details on competitors, rankings, times, multimedia clips and other administrative data. Access to the system is provided to journalists and commentators in real time via a mobile intranet which follows the race; the public can access up-to-the-minute information through the official tour Web site. ASO and ObjectStore Professional Services have also applied ObjectStore technology to the official Web site of the Paris-Dakar Rally, an international auto race. In the case of the Paris-Dakar Rally, access to the race site is provided through WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) to users in France and Spain.

ObjectStore was first used for the 1999 Tour de France, the largest single annual sporting event in the world. Developed in just five months, the system received over 270 million hits in total, with a hit rate of up to 35,000 hits per minute, and a peak of 21 million hits during one day of the race itself.

Based at the ASO offices in Paris, the ObjectStore application stores competitor ranking, positions during the event and live video clips and photographs available to download, as well as being a repository for major media organisations such as Sky TV, Canal + and TF1 who can access information for their papers.

With 200 riders going for five to six hours every day for three weeks, complex route maps and real-time lead changes, tracking an event like the Tour de France can be a serious challenge. With its unparalleled performance and scalability, ObjectStore is uniquely suited to delivering large volumes of complex data in real-time to millions of viewers worldwide.