Taming Explosive Growth: Scaling Financial Databases

Fwdays Tech Talks

Welcome to the third episode of Architecture Deep Dive with Oleksii Petrov! In today’s podcast, our guest — Dmytro Hnatiuk, Principal Software Engineer, Wise. In this episode, we dive deep into the challenges of scaling financial databases, handling explosive growth, and building resilient systems that can withstand massive transaction volumes. Dmytro shares insights from nearly a decade of experience working on high-load financial infrastructure, covering everything from indexing and query optimization to data partitioning, domain separation, and when (and when not) to consider distributed databases. Link to Dmytro’s presentation: "Taming Explosive Growth: Building Resilience in a Hyper-Scaled Financial Platform" 🔗 https://fwdays.com/en/event/highload-fwdays-2025/review/taming-explosive-growth-building-resilience-in-a-hyper-scaled-financial-platform What you should subscribe to: – More interesting content for developers: https://fwdays.com/en/events – Fwdays Twitter: https://twitter.com/fwdays – Oleksii Petrov's Telegram channel: https://t.me/OleksiiTheArchitect – Oleksii Petrov's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhelkar/ Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:24 - About Wise and Dmytro's Background 01:56 – Dmytro’s journey to Chief of Financial Databases at Wise 05:11 - Importance of Data Integrity in Financial Systems 07:04 - Scaling challenges at Wise 09:23 – Exponential data growth at Wise (1B records/month) 12:27 – Database performance and key metrics 13:39 – How do you actually scale a relational database? 16:18 – When a database becomes your bottleneck? 17:57 - The Performance Optimization Pyramid Explained 21:55 - Starting with Basic Database Setup and Configuration 24:15 - Cloud instances vs managed databases (EC2 vs AWS RDS) 25:40 - Effective Indexing Strategies and Common Pitfalls 32:04 - Application-Level Fixes for Better Performance 36:43 - Query Optimization Techniques and Tools 46:48 - Segregating Workloads for Efficiency 52:33 - Data Modularization and Domain Separation 59:46 - Implementing Table Partitioning 01:04:08 - Data Archival Strategies 01:06:33 - Horizontal sharding: the “top league” of scaling 01:07:49 - Thoughts on Distributed and Serverless Databases 01:11:15 - Summary of Scaling Achievements and Key Lessons 01:12:44 - Final Advice on Scaling Databases 01:13:37 - Don’t forget to subscribe and like!