BSE leverages MySQL Enterprise Edition for processing 150 million trades and 5 billion orders per day.
Introduction & Background
BSE, located in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, is Asia’s oldest and largest stock exchange. The company trades in equity, debt instruments, equity derivatives, currency derivatives, interest rate derivatives, mutual funds and also deals in stock lending and borrowing. Previously known as Bombay Stock Exchange, BSE plays a prominent role in developing India’s capital markets. Its trading system BOLT Plus is based on Deutsche Börse’s T7 trading technology.
Business Challenges & Goals
In 2019, after six years of exponential growth, BSE experienced the need for greater database performance and faster transaction processing. After migrating from MySQL Community Edition to MySQL Enterprise Edition, response time leapt from milliseconds to microseconds, orders per second rose by 30%, and the exchange witnessed a 70% increase in the speed of database execution.
Five years later, coming up to its 150th anniversary, BSE was faced with another challenge: 900% growth in buy and sell orders, along with a more than tenfold increase in daily trades in the Equity Derivatives segment. Buying or selling transactions surged from 500 million orders per day to 5 billion orders per day. Executed trades increased from 10 million per day to 150 million per day. Such heady growth over five years, fueled by a relaunch of its derivatives business, dictated the need for a robust and reliable storage system to handle large volumes of data transactions, ensure high availability, and provide quick access to trading data.
Business Results & Metrics
Deploying MySQL Enterprise Edition, BSE smoothly scaled to accommodate the 900% increase in trading volume and ensures persistent storage of each transaction. Benefiting from the upward trajectory of its derivatives business, clocking record turnovers, BSE operates serenely in the knowledge that its trading platform remains microsecond-responsive under ever growing loads, supported by MySQL as the database engine.
Data storage being mission critical to a stock exchange, the MySQL storage engine guarantees constant access to the timestamped record of billions of transactions along with BSE’s core trading reference data: masters, instruments, price bands, ranges, and formulas.
MySQL data persistence ensures that transaction records, trading history, and other critical data are securely stored, retrieved on demand by end-users, audited by regulatory agencies and available for trend analysis, forecasting, and strategic planning.
Continuous fine tuning of the system has allowed BSE to absorb the 900% increase in workload with no performance degradation. Deployment of MySQL Thread Pool and its “Max Transaction Limit” feature increased server performance by efficiently controlling the number of concurrently executing transactions.
In parallel, growth in trading called for the addition of multiple matching engines and a consequent increase in MySQL instances. When daily trades numbered 10 million and daily orders 500 million, BSE managed four engines for matching buy and sell commands, distributed over one MySQL instance. Fast forward to a 900% surge in business: the exchange upped its matching engines to 10 for derivatives, 4 for equities, and there are plans on adding more. Each matching engine is partitioned across multiple MySQL Enterprise Edition nodes, thus further fine tuning the system. After an order is matched, the details of the trade (executed price, quantity, time) are written back to MySQL for persistence and regulatory compliance.
In collaboration with MySQL Premier Support, which provides ongoing performance tuning, database sizing and configuration advice, BSE continues to optimize its platform by leveraging MySQL security-related parameters, including data encryption, backup, and disaster recovery.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?
Having worked with the MySQL database for 10 years and upgraded to MySQL Enterprise Edition in 2019, BSE knew that fine tuning of performance, scalability and storage would meet the challenge of its continuous growth and ensure smooth scale-out of its core trading platform.