Case Study Coming soon

Multi-Master MySQL for a Real-Time Options Trading Platform

Financial-grade MySQL architecture in the pre-synchronous-replication era: multi-master replication for trading accounts and positions, heavy sharding, 7,000+ QPS sustained — architected from outside, then operated from inside.

Client OptionMonster Holdings (via Tavant Technologies)

Role Director of Architecture → Senior MySQL Architect

Period 2007 – 2010

Scale 7,000+ QPS · 2TB+ clusters · Multi-master, heavily sharded

Before synchronous replication was production-viable in the MySQL world, financial trading platforms still had to not lose writes. This is a retrospective on building and operating the database architecture behind optionMONSTER’s trading platform — including the commercial synchronous-replication product that failed under load and was refunded.

The full write-up will cover:

Multi-master MySQL replication design for trading accounts, financial instruments, and account positions
Sharding strategy under ORM-generated query load
The synchronous-write proxy experiment: why it failed under load and what replaced it
Building database monitoring with SMS alerting that did not depend on data-center connectivity
The two-phase engagement: architecting the platform as a contractor, then being hired by the customer to operate it

Full case study coming soon.

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