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June 21, 2017

MongoDB to Deliver Critical Financial Data 250x Faster for IHS Markit

CHICAGO, June 21, 2017 — Mission-critical financial data is being served up to 250 times quicker to IHS Markit‘s customers, after the company migrated to MongoDB for its Data Delivery Service

IHS Markit (NASDAQ: Info), whose customers include 85% of the Fortune Global 500, is a world leader in information, analytics and solutions for the major industries and markets that drive economies worldwide. The company’s Data Delivery Service gives businesses access to more than 50 different streams of data including bonds pricing, commodities data and securities information. IHS Markit’s customers then make large financial decisions or hedge risk based on that information, often in real time.

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 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.

While performance was key, 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.”

To run the database at scale in a mission-critical environment, IHS Markit relies on MongoDB’s Ops Manager to configure, provision and back up the deployment. Using visualisation tool MongoDB Compass developers can continually optimise the schema (the blueprint of how data fits together) and queries (how the application and the database asks and answers specific questions).

IHS Markit has distributed the application’s database across three sites in London, Amsterdam, and New York. This configuration provides resilience to data centre failures and keeps data closer to users.

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About MongoDB

By offering the best of traditional databases as well as the flexibility, scale and performance today’s applications require, we let innovators deploy apps as big as they can possibly dream. From startups to enterprises, for the modern and the mission-critical, MongoDB is the database for giant ideas. For more information, visit www.mongodb.com

Source: MongoDB

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