MongoDB delivers financial data up to 250x faster says IHS Markit

The data delivery service is powered by a complex infrastructure originally built on a relational database. Growing data volumes and new requirements mandated a faster and more scalable solution. For many customers, the value of data is directly related to its timeliness so even the slightest delay risks placing them at a competitive disadvantage.

To improve the customer experience and the quality of service, IHS Markit, a provider of information and analytics solutions, made the decision last year to migrate to MongoDB for its Data Delivery Service. Testing found that with MongoDB’s non-relational document database, data could be read 250x faster, written 10x faster and storage requirements were reduced by 65%. These massive performance gains mean data gets to customers quicker, and unlocks new more complex delivery options, giving them a potential edge trading against their competitors.

“For our customers it’s not just that speed matters, it’s that we need to consistently provide absolute performance levels with growing data sets. Continuing with a relational database would have disqualified us from delivering the service they needed,” explained Sander Van Loo, Director of Data Delivery & Index Administration Services at IHS Markit.

MongoDB was also selected to replace the relational database due to its ability to quickly adapt to a wide variety of data sources. This flexibility dramatically increased the pace developers could build and deploy new data sources to customers, a key driver of revenue. MongoDB’s scalability then helped deliver vast improvements in how quickly data could be processed, even when dealing with dozens of terabytes a day.

For example, reading a year’s worth of end-of-day market data previously took 2,523 milliseconds but that was reduced to just 10 milliseconds on MongoDB. The performance improvements mean IHS Markit can now guarantee customers that data will be delivered within a strict time frame of just a few milliseconds, creating some of most competitive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in the industry.

Van Loo added: “It’s been fantastic to offer our customers a faster service and MongoDB has also made our developers more productive. We’re now able to build functionality and performance that was simply not possible before.”