Piletilevi
The architectural foundation for Estonia’s national ticketing portal, engineered to survive extreme concurrent spikes when marquee events go on sale.
Role
Developer, CMA
Years
mid-2000s
Focus
High-concurrency ticketing
Piletilevi is Estonia’s major national ticketing portal. Built at CMA, the core engineering challenge was singular and unforgiving: prevent double-booking under sudden, massive concurrent load when a marquee event opens for sale.
Transactional integrity above all
The solution leaned on a robust transactional database with row-level locking during checkout, built on the PHP and XML/WSDL-heavy stack standard for the era. Overselling a venue because of database lag is a catastrophic business failure, so the implementation prioritized correctness over cleverness.
A textbook case of matching architectural decisions to a business-critical constraint — when integrity is non-negotiable, you design for it first.