SchoolAI Customer Story

Sept 19, 2024 • 5 Min Read

SchoolAI's Success with Tembo

How Tembo Helped SchoolAI

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SchoolAI’s Database Management Challenges

SchoolAI wants to build a future where every student's learning journey is as unique as they are. Designed for K12 students with built-in monitoring and controls for teachers, more than 12,000 teachers across 1,500 districts nationwide have adopted SchoolAI. The platform offers AI tutors, interactive games, simulations, well-being check-ins, a library of grade and subject-specific activities, and dashboards offering real-time feedback and moderation.

Due to ElephantSQL closing its doors, SchoolAI found themselves shopping for a database provider, specifically one that was well integrated with Pgvector. They were looking for a reliable database service and were attracted to the Postgres offerings that Tembo provides. SchoolAI initially started exploring Tembo’s capabilities in late February of 2024 and were impressed by the product and the level of help they received while exploring possibilities. By early March, they decided to fully migrate their database to Tembo for all their PostgreSQL needs.

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How Tembo Simplifies SchoolAI’s Stack

SchoolAI considers themselves a strong advocate for simplifying the data stack and using Postgres for hosting critical services wherever possible. So far, they have implemented pgvector and pg_trgm extensions for RAG-based documents and website search. While they have yet to leverage some of the advanced features of Tembo, such as pgvectorize, they are excited to continue moving forward with this strategic partnership and exploring more Tembo products for future integrations.

“We’re very Open-AI dependent right now, and slowly making our way towards more optionality. One of the reasons Tembo appeals here is that we can build some of our in-house services in a way that takes advantage of lower-cost LLMs – for example, using latest mxbai or nomic embeddings at ollama.com or RAG.”

Duane Johnson

Database Platform Lead, SchoolAI

Results and Benefits

SchoolAI has been impressed with the reliability of the service and the level and promptness of assistance provided by Tembo. For instance, when they required a read-only replica, Tembo delivered it within days. Furthermore, another example of Tembo's exceptional support was when the Tembo support team identified and resolved a barrier SchoolAI had with Posthog. By submitting a PR to Posthog's open-source repository, Tembo’s team ensured that all SNI users, including Tembo's, benefited from the fix.

“We're very happy with Tembo’s reliability. When our service had a small outage (of our own making) the Tembo team reached out to report what they were seeing and offer support without having to pick up the phone. I've also seen the team proactively report outages that haven't affected us. That just reassures me, all the more, that Tembo's priorities align with our highest priority: uptime for our production service.”

Duane Johnson

Database Platform Lead, SchoolAI

Outcomes

The ease of spinning up and down databases and restoring to a point in time has provided SchoolAI with the flexibility needed for various use cases, including onboarding contractors and exploring different naming schemes and test databases.

“Easily being able to spin up point in time copies of our database has given us confidence in another direction - when bringing contractors on, for example, we spun up a 300 GB instance for their private use. I’ve also explored several naming schemes, tmp databases, and test databases. The ease of use here makes it feel like a database can be as ephemeral or permanent as we need.”

Duane Johnson

Database Platform Lead, SchoolAI

Future Plans

SchoolAI is experiencing solid growth, with data increasing by approximately 1 GB per day. They’ve recently increased their storage and compute to accommodate this growth. Moving forward, SchoolAI aims to better leverage Tembo-specific value propositions in AI and other services.

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Conclusion

SchoolAI's journey with Tembo has been marked by reliability, proactive support, and expert assistance. As they continue to grow and explore new possibilities, Tembo remains a trusted partner in their database management needs. With a few improvements and continued collaboration, SchoolAI looks forward to unlocking even more potential with Tembo.

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