How Database Systems Performance Bottleneck can impact a very successful FinTech. company?

How Database Systems Performance Bottleneck can impact a very successful FinTech. company?



Database systems performance is crucial for FinTech companies as it directly impacts the speed and reliability of financial transactions. Slow or unreliable databases can cause delays in processing transactions and result in lost revenue or customer dissatisfaction. High-performance databases can ensure fast and accurate processing of financial transactions, leading to improved customer experience and increased revenue. Additionally, high-performance databases can also help to prevent fraud and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Therefore, it is essential for FinTech companies to have a robust and high-performing database infrastructure in place to support their business operations.

What are the major high volume transaction processing database applications used in a bank?

1. Online banking systems
2. ATM and debit/credit card systems
3. Loan origination and servicing systems
4. Deposit and withdrawal systems
5. Trading and investment systems
6. Risk management systems
7. Fraud detection and prevention systems
8. Customer relationship management systems
9. Core banking systems
10. Payment processing systems.
 
These applications typically require database systems that can handle high levels of concurrency, high throughput, and low latency, such as NoSQL databases, in-memory databases, and columnar databases.
 
How slow database systems performance affect customer satisfaction and increase churns?

Slow database systems performance can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and increase churns. When a customer experiences slow performance or delays while interacting with a database-driven application, they may become frustrated and lose trust in the application or service. This can lead to decreased engagement, longer wait times, and a higher likelihood of customers leaving for a competitor’s service. Additionally, if a slow database system causes delays or errors in processing financial transactions, it can lead to customer dissatisfaction and loss of business. Therefore, ensuring high performance and reliability of database systems is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and reducing churns.

What are the major bottlenecks in Database Systems Performance?

There are several major bottlenecks that can negatively impact the performance of a database system, these include:

1. Disk I/O: Disk I/O is one of the most common bottlenecks in database systems. Slow disk access can cause delays in reading and writing data, which can lead to slow query performance and reduced overall system performance.
2. Memory: Limited memory can cause the database to swap to disk, which can slow down the entire system.
3. CPU: High CPU utilization can cause delays in processing queries, which can lead to slow query performance and reduced overall system performance.
4. Network: Network latency can cause delays in transmitting data between the database server and clients, which can lead to slow query performance and reduced overall system performance.
5. Concurrency: High levels of concurrency can cause delays in processing queries, which can lead to slow query performance and reduced overall system performance.
6. Indexing: Poorly designed indexes can cause slow query performance and reduced overall system performance.
7. Configuration: Incorrectly configured database systems can lead to poor performance and reduced overall system performance.
8. Data growth: Large amounts of data can cause slow query performance, backups that take too long, and storage issues.
9. Resource contention: Multiple processes or queries that are trying to access the same resources can cause delays in processing queries and reduced overall system performance.

10. Scalability: As the data and workloads grow, the database system may not be able to scale and handle the increased load, which can lead to slow query performance and reduced overall system performance.

It’s important to monitor and troubleshoot these bottlenecks regularly to ensure your database system is performing optimally.

Golden rules for designing database systems architecture for performance

1. Understand your data and access patterns: Understand the characteristics of your data, such as its size, distribution, and access patterns. This will help you choose the appropriate storage engine, partitioning scheme, and indexing strategy.
2. Optimize your schema: Optimize your schema design for performance by minimizing the number of joins, indexing frequently queried columns, and choosing the appropriate data types.
3. Use caching: Use caching techniques such as query caching, table caching, and page caching to improve performance.
4. Monitor and tune: Regularly monitor and tune your database systems to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks. This includes monitoring things like CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O, and network traffic.
5. Scale horizontally: Scale your database systems horizontally by adding more nodes to your cluster or sharding your data across multiple servers.
6. Utilize load balancers: Utilize load balancers to distribute traffic across multiple servers, improving performance and availability.
7. Use connection pooling: Use connection pooling to reduce the overhead of creating and closing database connections.
8. Use prepared statements: Use prepared statements to improve performance and security by reducing the number of parsed statements.
9. Use connection pooling: Use connection pooling to reduce the overhead of creating and closing database connections.
10. Use the right replication method: Choose the right replication method for your use case, whether it be master-slave, master-master, or multi-master replication.
 

How to build High-Performance Database Systems Architecture for Internet Scale?

Building a high-performance database systems architecture for internet scale requires a combination of different techniques and strategies. Some of the key elements to consider include:
 
1. Scale-out architecture: This involves distributing the load across multiple nodes to increase capacity and improve performance.
2. Data partitioning: This involves dividing the data into smaller chunks and storing them across different nodes. This helps to improve query performance and reduce contention.
3. Indexing: Indexing is a critical aspect of database performance. Indexes help to improve query performance by providing a faster way to access the data.
4. Caching: Caching is another important aspect of database performance. It helps to reduce the number of disk I/O operations and improve query performance.
5. Monitoring and tuning: Regular monitoring and tuning of the database systems is critical to ensure optimal performance. This includes monitoring key metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk I/O, and tuning the database configuration parameters as needed.
6. Backup and disaster recovery: High-performance databases require a robust disaster recovery plan in case of a failure. This includes regular backups and testing of the recovery process.
7. Data governance: For a high-performance database system, it is important to have good governance in place to manage the data, including data quality, data lineage, and data security.
8. Automation: Automating repetitive tasks such as backups, replication, and monitoring can help to improve performance and reduce the risk of human error.
9. Data compression: Data compression techniques like Dictionary encoding, Delta encoding, Run-length encoding, LZ4 compression and Huffman encoding can help to reduce the size of data and improve query performance.
10. Real-time replication: In High-performance database, replication is a key aspect, it should be fast and reliable.

Overall, building a high-performance database systems architecture requires a comprehensive understanding of the underlying technology, as well as the ability to implement best practices and use the right tools and techniques.

☛ Database SRE Services from MinervaDB


DBAs have been managing Database Systems infrastructure for several years now addressing performance, scalability, high availability and Database SRE. But, the database volume has grown quite aggressively in last 20 years increasing the operational complexity. When the volume of data increased and adding more database instances to manage in physical, virtual and containers, the obvious solution is to use code to manage database instances (and the tools that runs on them). Technically Database SRE is about an implementation of DBA DevOps infrastructure. Database SRE essentially involves creating a bridge between development and DBA operations.  In MinervaDB, We build custom Database SRE infrastructure for our customers. For instance, a large organization’s implementation of SRE is not the same as that of a startup especially in terms of affording a team for this role. Our Database Infrastructure Operations site reliability engineers are committed to the early discovery of problems to reduce the cost of database infrastructure outage.

☛ Database Infrastructure Site Reliability Engineering Services (SRE) from MinervaDB

  • Custom installation and configuration of our customer database technologies stack addressing performance, scalability and high availability.
  • Performance Benchmarking to proactively measure latency and throughput to troubleshoot database system performance bottleneck proactively.
  • Capacity planning and sizing  – Building database systems for performance and reliability.
  • Performance audit, diagnostics, forensics and health-check – Proactive performance troubleshooting.
  • Building self-healing and fault-tolerant database infrastructure operations for high availability and reliability.
  • Database Infrastructure backup and data recovery services .
  • Secured Data Ops. services – Data privacy / encryption, policy based user logins, deploying custom data access firewalls and transaction audit .
  • Database technologies stack seamless upgrades and migration .

Cloud DBA Services by MinervaDB


Technically, Database Systems as a Service (DBaaS) provided by several companies like Amazon(AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure etc., works like an Orchestrator of Database Systems Infrastructure addressing fully autonomous installation/setup/configuration, upgrades/updates/patching, performance optimisation/tuning and scale-out. The DBaaS takes care of all the routine Database Systems Maintenance Operations tasks like hardware infrastructure identification/provisioning/procurement, patching, backups, data security etc. Does that mean you don’t need a DBA?  DBA is a function and not a role, so DBAs will continue working very closely with CTOs/CIOs/Founders/CEOs helping them build optimal, scalable, highly reliable and secured Database Infrastructure Operations.

☛ Why Database Systems as a Service (DBaaS)  is technically and strategically so compelling for building Database Infrastructure for Performance and Scalability?

  • Cost-efficient and scalable
  • Time-to-Market benefits
  • Database Infrastructure Maintenance Operations Routine Tasks will be automated:
    • Setup and configuration
    • Fully autonomous performance tuning/optimisation
    • Backup and DR
    • Capacity Planning and Sizing
    • Scale-out / Sharding / Clustering Solution
    • Upgrades / Patching

☛ How MinervaDB can help you with Cloud DBA Services for building optimal, scalable and cost-efficient Database Systems as a Service (DBaaS) on AWS(Amazon Cloud), GCP(Google Cloud)and Microsoft Azure

  • Database Architecture (Logical and Physical Schema) Design and Engineering Services
  • Optimal SQL Engineering Services
  • Optimal Indexing
  • SQL Tuning Services
  • Database Application Design/Engineering Performance Audit and Recommendations
  • Architecting and Engineering Secured Database Infrastructure:
    • GDPR: General Data Protection Directive
    • PCI DSS: Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
    • HIPAA: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
    • HITECH: Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act
    • Data Protection Act: United Kingdom
    • SOX: Sarbanes Oxley
    • FERPA: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
    • And many more

☛ MinervaDB Benefits

  • Vendor neutral and independent, Enterprise-class consulting, 24*7 support and remote DBA services for MySQL, MariaDB, MyRocks, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
  • Virtual corporation with an global team of seasoned professionals – We have consultants operating from multiple locations worldwide, All of us work from home and stay connected via email, Google Hangouts, Skype, private IRC, WhatsApp, Telegram and phone. Being an virtual corporation we can hire the best talent from anywhere in the world, This makes an truly 24*7 operational team.
  • Competitive pricing – We are an virtual corporation so we don’t charge the customers for our infrastructure cost, What you pay us goes purely for our unmatched technology team.
  • We operate 24*7 – Our team operates from multiple locations worldwide so we are available 24*7.
  • Cloud DBA Services – IaaS and DBaaS including: Oracle Cloud, Google CloudSQL, Amazon Aurora, AWS RDS®, EC2®, Microsoft Azure® and Rackspace® Cloud.
  • Pay As You Go billing model – You pay us only for the hours worked, We don’t ask for advances ever !! We are committed to delivering cost efficient consulting, support and services for our customers globally.
  • Transparent ticketing system – We share with you the detailed work report of what we have done for your database infrastructure, This also includes how you will get benefitted with change we have done. We love absolutes transparency and detailed documentation.
  • Emergency support available for you even when you are not our customer, Emergency support channels – Email, Slack, Google Hangouts, Skype and Phone.
  • Pay per incident option available – You need our support in just fixing a single incident ? No problem, We have that option available.

☛ Technology focus – Vendor-neutral and independent

Technology FocusTools and Technologies
LinuxUbuntu, Debian, CentOS, Red Hat Linux, Oracle Linux and SUSE Linux.
MySQLMySQL GA, MySQL Enterprise, InnoDB, MySQL Enterprise Backup, MySQL Cluster CGE, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Utilities, MySQL Enterprise Audit, MySQL Enterprise Firewall and MySQL Router.
PerconaPercona Server for MySQL, XtraDB, TokuDB, RocksDB, Percona Toolkit, Percona XtraBackup and PMM(Percona Monitoring & Management).
MariaDBMariaDB Server, RocksDB, MariaDB Galera Cluster, MariaDB Backup, MariaDB MaxScale and MariaDB ColumnStore.
PostgreSQLPostgreSQL Performance Benchmarking, Capacity Planning / Sizing, PostgreSQL Performance Optimization, PostgreSQL High Availability / Database Reliability Engineering, PostgreSQL Upgrades / Migration and PostgreSQL Security
Cloud DBA ServicesIaaS and DBaaS including: Oracle Cloud, Google CloudSQL, Amazon Aurora, AWS RDS®, EC2®, Microsoft Azure® and Rackspace® Cloud
Performance Monitoring and Trending PlatformsMySQL Enterprise Monitor, Icinga, Zabbix, Prometheus and Grafana.
High Availability, Scale-Out, Replication and Load BalancerMySQL Group Replication, MySQL Cluster CGE, InnoDB Cluster, Galera Cluster, Percona XtraDB Cluster, MariaDB MaxScale, Continuent Tungsten Replicator, MHA (Master High Availability Manager and tools for MySQL), HAProxy, ProxySQL, MySQL Router and Vitess.
Columnar Database SystemsClickHouse, MariaDB ColumnStore
DevOps. and AutomationVagrant, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Ganglia, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Consul, JIRA, Graylog and Grafana.






About Shiv Iyer 437 Articles
Open Source Database Systems Engineer with a deep understanding of Optimizer Internals, Performance Engineering, Scalability and Data SRE. Shiv currently is the Founder, Investor, Board Member and CEO of multiple Database Systems Infrastructure Operations companies in the Transaction Processing Computing and ColumnStores ecosystem. He is also a frequent speaker in open source software conferences globally.