ForeTees' databases support customer-facing applications used by private golf, country, and social clubs, including tee-times reservations, event management, scoring, dining, and point-of-sale systems, where availability and performance directly affect member experience. As usage peaks during busy play and event windows, the ForeTees team needed high confidence in monitoring and recovery paths. Working with Percona ExpertOps, ForeTees improved recovery, ensured 24x7 coverage, and reduced operational risk for customer-facing databases.
Percona provides ForeTees with:
ForeTees
Technology
50+
ExpertOPS
MariaDB, MySQL
As ForeTees continued to grow its customer base and expand its suite of services, the company's small internal IT team faced a classic scaling challenge. With business-critical databases at the core of the platform, the team was responsible for maintaining high availability, strong performance, and reliable recovery — all while supporting an increasingly complex and demanding environment.
Like many lean, high-performing teams, ForeTees needed to balance day-to-day operations with ambitious growth initiatives. As the company began serving larger customers with more formal service-level expectations, the team recognized the need to strengthen database operations without adding significant headcount.
ForeTees brings all these disparate elements together into a single package available in the cloud. Using integrated services, websites, apps, and point-of-sale systems, clubs can ensure their customers get a great experience, and the business functions efficiently and profitably. Behind all this, ForeTees relies on its databases to hold its customer and application data.
Paul Sindelar, Director of Technology at ForeTees, oversees the company's technology strategy and hands-on management of its critical databases. As ForeTees accelerated its growth and introduced new functionality, Sindelar saw the opportunity to evolve how the team supported the underlying infrastructure. He realized that bringing in external expertise would allow the internal team to focus more on innovation and strategic initiatives while ensuring the databases could scale reliably with the business.
Currently, ForeTees runs MariaDB on servers that support all of the company's data infrastructure. Sindelar looked into who could provide the best possible support around these databases and decided to work with Percona.
"We were looking for experts in open source databases, and the Percona team demonstrated their insight and proactive approach right from the start. We decided to engage their Professional Services team so we could get unbiased and independent advice on what our next steps should be as we support the company's growth," explains Sindelar. "Alongside this, we also wanted help on our system reliability and disaster recovery planning."
When ForeTees first started engaging with Percona through Professional Services, it was when they began to see the impact of growth on their MariaDB environment. Without the need for more headcount, Paul and the Percona team took a step back, looked at how the database was being used, and identified any performance or stability risks before they became bigger problems. Percona performed a full performance and health review, covering the database, operating system, and infrastructure, and worked directly with the ForeTees team to explain what was working well and what needed attention. The findings and recommendations from this work helped ForeTees plan future hardware purchases, evaluate options like clustering and database upgrades, and better prepare for upcoming infrastructure changes. This initial project provided clear, practical guidance and built the trust that led ForeTees to move from project-based consulting into ongoing Support and later Managed Services with Percona.
Following on from the initial project, ForeTees now relies on Percona for its database management and performance advice. This includes collaboration on designing database implementations for scalability, and support for tracking service levels, availability, and reliability metrics.
"As a business, we are expanding our range of services all the time; so we are now targeting much larger organizations that require formal SLAs and delivery. With Percona, we have already put together our reporting, and we can deliver on those service levels too," says Sindelar. "Looking at the graphs and some of the work that the database is doing behind the scenes, we can tell that the changes have made improvements, and it is now operating more efficiently and effectively."
Percona's Managed Services team has already demonstrated the value that it provides to the business. When Sindelar was concerned about a performance variable on one of the company's servers, and because Percona was already operating and monitoring the environment, the team was able to resolve the issue before it affected business operations. "We saw something that could have been an issue, but we needed help to understand the potential impact. We didn't even have to pick up the phone — one Slack message and we got a near instant resolution to the request. That kind of service is essential when you are dealing with critical customer data," he added.
Following on from the initial recommendations and support assistance, Sindelar has expanded the range of work that Percona has helped to deliver. This includes implementing thorough backup processes for more resilient systems, and a planned migration to MySQL 8.0. With these recommendations, Sindelar estimates that the business would be able to recover between two and four times faster from downtime thanks to Percona.
With a limited team available to support the company's databases previously, Sindelar can now turn to Percona for support and management cover around the clock. "Before, any time we wanted to take time off, there was always that worry of what we would do if something went wrong — how would we be able to manage the response or get systems back up and running. That meant we could never really relax. Now with Percona, we know we have the right experts in our corner," explains Sindelar. "That has made a big difference to our technical performance and to our ability to support the business as it grows, but it has also helped our peace of mind."
Results
Golf club management firm ForeTees chose Percona for managed services support, proactive recommendations on performance improvement, and migration support around moving to MySQL 8.0.
The project delivered the following results:
ForeTees is a club management and reservation platform designed specifically for private golf, country, and social clubs, streamlining their operations and enhancing the member experience. Founded in 2002, the company provides a suite of cloud-based tools, including an industry-leading tee-time reservation system, court and fitness scheduling, dining management, and event registration. Beyond reservations, ForeTees offers back-office solutions, including accounting software, point-of-sale systems, and member communication tools.
