Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

FNI created a SaaS solution that provides a quick and easy way to make better lending and origination decisions based on data. Our customers usually choose FNI because they value our “out of the box” functionality for making these decisions, and the analytical support our platform delivers along the way.

As FNI grew, however, our database needs dramatically increased. We were originally an Oracle customer and considered meeting our increasing database needs by extending our Oracle relationship. But after reviewing the costs associated with that, we realized that absorbing those costs would prevent us from offering our customers a competitive price. Our costs, and so our pricing, would simply be too high. But we also knew that without a more comprehensive, sophisticated data management solution, we could not keep up with our customer growth. This led us to look for a new database solution to support our company as it grew.

The Solution

We recognized our customer base was growing and their needs were becoming more sophisticated. Disaster recovery and data encryption features were critical for our long-term business growth. At the same time, it was clear that we couldn’t meet these challenges by extending our Oracle footprint since that was cost-prohibitive. So we decided to go in a completely different direction and consider enterprise open source databases.

We were already familiar with MariaDB and when the company introduced data encryption at rest, MariaDB immediately became our first choice.

MariaDB stands out for its ability to handle high volumes of data without downtime; the scalability and security features were also critical for our team. By migrating to MariaDB, we were able to provide more services and modernize our offerings for our customers.

The results

The migration has been fairly painless so far. For context, last year, we were running 5 percent of customers through MariaDB. By February this year, we were at 42 percent and we’re hoping to be 90 to 100 percent by the end of this year. We’ve processed well over a million billable transactions through MariaDB so far. And we’re saving, in the neighborhood of, half of what we would be spending with Oracle. More when you factor in hardware costs.

Moving to MariaDB, the scalability is there. We can run it on any kind of hardware we want and it does not cost extra because we pay for a license for that server and it doesn’t matter what that server is.

Metrics

Once we could show that the features could stand up to Oracle, it came down to overall cost savings. Ultimately, we were trying to innovate and offer new, better customer solutions. That meant we needed to find significant savings within our data infrastructure.

I am precluded from getting into too much detail, however our business model is based on billable transactions to some extent and to date the MariaDB production deployment has processed millions of those transactions. It has also handled this load with no problems processing an approximate average of 119 queries per second. This is a point-in-time average, so during busier times of the day and our customers’ peak times can be much higher. To put this into perspective, the total number of queries processed is nearly a half billion statements on MariaDB.

The Technology

We migrated our core database from Oracle Database to MariaDB TX.

Disruptive Factor

The biggest challenge was making the decision to untangle from Oracle. However, MariaDB made it fairly straightforward. Our skills transferred seamlessly. MariaDB met our security requirements without having to purchase separate add-ons, and they proved to be a company we wanted to partner with to scale our business.

If we had continued to invest in Oracle, we would have eventually gone out of business. With MariaDB, we're freed to innovate with our products and scale our business.

Shining Moment

I was excited to share the specifics of our migration and lessons learned during a session I led at MariaDB’s user conference earlier this year. It was great to network with other database colleagues and share my methods and results. I learned so much through this process that I know will be helpful to others that are experiencing similar pain points. I’ve written a book on Migrating to MariaDB, set to be published later this year.