Welcome to the third episode of Architecture Deep Dive with Oleksii Petrov!

In today’s podcast, our guest — Dmytro Hnatiuk, Principal Software Engineer, Wise.
In this episode, we dive deep into the challenges of scaling financial databases, handling explosive growth, and building resilient systems that can withstand massive transaction volumes. Dmytro shares insights from nearly a decade of experience working on high-load financial infrastructure, covering everything from indexing and query optimization to data partitioning, domain separation, and when (and when not) to consider distributed databases.

Link to Dmytro’s presentation: "Taming Explosive Growth: Building Resilience in a Hyper-Scaled Financial Platform" 🔗 https://fwdays.com/en/event/highload-fwdays-2025/review/taming-explosive-growth-building-resilience-in-a-hyper-scaled-financial-platform

What you should subscribe to:
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– Oleksii Petrov's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhelkar/

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:24 - About Wise and Dmytro's Background
01:56 – Dmytro’s journey to Chief of Financial Databases at Wise
05:11 - Importance of Data Integrity in Financial Systems
07:04 - Scaling challenges at Wise
09:23 – Exponential data growth at Wise (1B records/month)
12:27 – Database performance and key metrics
13:39 – How do you actually scale a relational database?
16:18 – When a database becomes your bottleneck?
17:57 - The Performance Optimization Pyramid Explained
21:55 - Starting with Basic Database Setup and Configuration
24:15 - Cloud instances vs managed databases (EC2 vs AWS RDS)
25:40 - Effective Indexing Strategies and Common Pitfalls
32:04 - Application-Level Fixes for Better Performance
36:43 - Query Optimization Techniques and Tools
46:48 - Segregating Workloads for Efficiency
52:33 - Data Modularization and Domain Separation
59:46 - Implementing Table Partitioning
01:04:08 - Data Archival Strategies
01:06:33 - Horizontal sharding: the “top league” of scaling
01:07:49 - Thoughts on Distributed and Serverless Databases
01:11:15 - Summary of Scaling Achievements and Key Lessons
01:12:44 - Final Advice on Scaling Databases
01:13:37 - Don’t forget to subscribe and like!