5 ms·

The real answer here is that it's proably never going to be cheaper to buy a bank with a working it platform as merging terabyte worth of actively changing data

The real answer here is that it's proably never going to be cheaper to buy a bank with a working it platform as merging terabyte worth of actively changing data from an underdocumented 1960 noSQL database into a new greenfield product is the hard problem almost nobody have succeeded at doing without massive problems and unexpected delays and costs. In reality what happens when a bank buys another bank is that yet another middleware layer is introduced so that frontend system can access data from both of the old system not that one system is discarded while the other survive.

shakna 8y ago
> underdocumented 1960 noSQL database Depends on what you mean by 'undocumented'. The specsheets for the Fortran part of the stack at CommBank was 4000+ pages last I saw it. The COBOL side was 9000+. Then there were a couple million test cases for both, and a running system with no real users that got tested before production.
tim333 8y ago
You'd think they could copy over the limited data people actually need - account balance, direct debits, mortgage status and payments and the like over to the new system and archive all the other stuff?