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This title is misleading, and the article is missing a key piece of information. This is ONE system at HSBC - out of literally HUNDREDS (maybe thousands) of ap
by koheripbal 6y ago
This title is misleading, and the article is missing a key piece of information.
This is ONE system at HSBC - out of literally HUNDREDS (maybe thousands) of applications. It's not as if HSBC is moving ALL of its applications to MongoDB. HSBC doesn't have a single tech stack. They have thousands of IT employees all using different tech, in different parts of the world, for different departments. This might be as inconsequential as the system that catalogues security camera feed URLs - or maybe the one that monitors remote employee company mobile data usage - who the F knows, because the article gives us zero information.
Account Management, Credit Cards, Mortgages, Security, Asset Management, HR, Legal, Compliance, Regulatory, Risk Management, Trading, Operations, Building management, Payroll, ATM comms, Clearance/settlement, Website, a million different reporting engines, etc, etc, etc... and then each region usually has its own application for each function - literally hundreds of tech stacks in every tech you can imagine from DB2 Mainframe to Oracle to MongoDB. All banks are like this.
This article is just vague PR and is just referring to one single group consolidating their regional instances. It does not deserve HN attention.
- flurdy 6y agoI initially rebuked thinking that the OP sounds like a disaster, but then I remember from working with other banks that they have an infinite amount of systems from decades of mergers, re-org, etc, all siloed in so many different ways. So in no way was the OP's article as catastrophic as it initially sounded.
- chrisweekly 6y agoYour point is clear enough, but FYI you're misusing the word "rebuked". ("recoiled"? "reacted"?)
- flurdy 6y agoI think I merged two sentences and feelings into one. :)
- tcgv 6y agoThe article is very shallow on technical details indeed. It seems they are trying to promote MongoDB as the solution to their failed attempt of standardizing their application/data model: > Historically, (...) HSBC did have an application core program environment, which had most of an application's core functionality. But it couldn't have a single programme environment running for all the countries, due to the differences in data models and databases. > Another benefit is to use the same database for global data analytics and reporting. We don't need to translate into another data model or another database to run the analytics and reporting from that particular data. So this "application core program" failed to provide an unified solution to their data warehousing needs, and now they believe they can solve this problem by unifying 65 databases into one MongoDB instance, "taking advantage" of its schema-less model. It looks more like a global storage service than anything else to me.
- DenisM 6y agoSo, problem: schema does not accommodate enough use cases. Solution 1: refactor schema Solution 2: abandon schema The truth is that you can’t really abandon schema, it’s just spread through the code base now, and any violation of the schema will blow up not when you write malformed data but when you read it later.
- thedudeabides5 6y agoTruth. Anyone know any good tools to manage the evolution in schemas to address this problem?
- DenisM 6y agoAt the lower level I’ve found ActiveMigration from ruby inspirational. Not using ruby but the idea is solid and I have built a similar system for C# and SQL Server. You still need something higher level to oversee the schema, but I didn’t look closely - my schema is small enough I can keep track of it in my head.
- ric2b 6y agoFlyway is a good tool if you don't want to be tied to a specific language. The community version (open-source/free) does have a few important limitations that may or may not matter to you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tixocloud 6y agoIt’s very common for tech companies to try and paint a pretty growth picture when it comes to banks but you’re right. There are just so many technology stacks and so many databases across the entire organization that this feels light in terms of effort in financial services.