Introduction
NJ India Invest is the flagship company of NJ Group, a leading player in the Indian financial services industry known for its strong mutual funds distribution capabilities. Based in the Smart City of Surat in Gujarat State, it has presence in 100 locations across India and employs 1,475 staff.
In 2017 NJ India Invest decided to upgrade to MySQL Enterprise Edition to enhance database performance, streamline backup and restore, and increase control over its MySQL database instances.
Challenges
- Ensure round-the-clock high transaction performance of the company's online trading platform
- Provide uninterrupted service to mutual fund trading customers by guaranteeing 24/7 uptime of critical database systems and minimizing potential disaster recovery times
- Streamline day-to-day operations and eliminate the risk of data loss by replacing lengthy overnight backup and restore with flexible hot backup, backup compression, and point-in-time recovery
- Facilitate compliance with regulations of the financial services industry
The MySQL Solution
NJ India Invest chose MySQL Enterprise Edition primarily for the following benefits:
- Empowered online customers to process financial transactions in real time with no locking, disconnect, or waiting time thanks to MySQL Thread Pool
- Provided customers with a seamless, uninterrupted online trading experience by slashing backup and restore time from 10 hours to 45 minutes using the online hot backup capabilities of MySQL Enterprise Backup
- Improved visibility and control over the performance and stability of MySQL database instances through the notifications and alerts stemming from MySQL Enterprise Monitor
- Satisfied the company's needs and met the relevant financial services industry regulations with MySQL Enterprise Edition's advanced security features
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition
NJ India Invest first launched its online trading platform using MySQL Community. But the free downloadable Community Edition was not providing the expected performance and real-time online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities required to satisfy millions of online mutual fund investors. It also lacked the production-ready capabilities of MySQL Enterprise Edition to host critical applications.
The company evaluated migrating to competitors such as MariaDB Galera Cluster or upgrading to MySQL Enterprise Edition. It had already deployed MySQL Enterprise Edition for its test and development environment and considered MySQL the best database for OLTP applications with an outstanding price-performance ratio.
Using an on-premise subscription license for MySQL Enterprise Edition, NJ India Invest provided a boost to concurrent transaction volumes through very fast query processing. It also drastically reduced backup and restore times, while achieving greater visibility and control over query performance.
The infrastructure compatibility was checked with support from MySQL consultants and MySQL Upgrade checker.
Acquiring and Retaining Customers
Essential to the success of NJ India Invest's growth strategy is customer satisfaction stemming from a great online experience. With thousands of customers logged onto the company's mutual funds trading platform concurrently, the system must be up and running 24/7, offer maximum performance and scalability, and support large volumes of financial transactions.
MySQL Thread Pool is a plugin allowing for concurrency of execution that increases server performance by efficiently managing statement execution threads for large numbers of client connections. Leveraging this feature NJ India Invest provides a rich customer experience.
Disaster Recovery Strategy
One of NJ India Invest's priorities was to put in place a business continuity plan that would eliminate the risk of detrimental harm to the organization caused by system failure. Its objective was to achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero and the lowest possible recovery time objective (RTO) for its database servers. This strategy is now functional through full, incremental, and partial backups managed by MySQL Enterprise Backup with no impact on transaction processing. Hot backups of huge data volumes take only 30 to 35 minutes against 8 to 10 hours previously.
Implementation
The solution was deployed in January 2017 by an in-house team which in 3 months upgraded from MySQL Community to MySQL Enterprise Edition assisted by MySQL consultants and Oracle whitepapers.