BSE

BSE Takes Online Trading from Milliseconds to Microseconds
with MySQL Enterprise Edition

"We wanted a leaner, meaner, faster system and MySQL Enterprise Edition allowed us to jump from millisecond to microsecond-level performance, setting a new benchmark in India for high speed trading, with huge gains in reliability, stability, and scalability backed by first class support."

V. Arvindkumar Iyengar
Senior GM IT Software Development, BSE Limited

Introduction

BSE is the world's fastest and Asia's number one stock exchange. It trades in equity, currencies, debt instruments, derivatives, and mutual funds. BSE Star MF, India's largest online mutual fund platform, processes over 2.7 million transactions per month. BSE also owns India INX, a dollar-based exchange that complements its trading in Indian Rupees.

Online trading is facilitated through the BOLT Plus back-end infrastructure based on the T7 trading platform developed by Deutsche Börse. In 2013, BSE switched from a legacy IT system to an open source architecture on commodity hardware, Linux Red Hat as operating system and MySQL Community Edition as the core database engine.

After six years of exponential growth, the company experienced the need for greater database performance, faster transaction processing, and engineering support. It migrated from MySQL Community Edition to MySQL Enterprise Edition to better manage increased trading volumes. With its new platform, response time leapt from milliseconds to microseconds.

Business Challenges & Goals

  • Execute more orders at a faster pace with ever-growing online trading and generate more constant revenue.
  • Accelerate backup and restore operations to consolidate end-of-day trading faster and meet regulations.
  • Strengthen trading platform monitoring for tracking and tuning order processing efficiency.
  • Improve availability, reliability, and scalability to ensure constant uptime of the trading platform, its reference data engine, and overall performance.
  • Obtain access to non-stop worldwide support for mission-critical systems.

Business Results & Metrics

  • Enhanced trading platform performance through the high availability and scalability of MySQL Enterprise Edition, guaranteeing to brokers and investment managers in multiple markets the world's fastest stock exchange for online trading.
  • Boosted orders per second by 30% thanks to performance monitoring and tuning of MySQL Enterprise Edition, eliminating backpressure of rewrite operations and allowing maximum booking of orders.
  • Increased by 70%, the speed of database execution performance with MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MySQL Query Analyzer for continuous, real-time monitoring of queries and performance metrics across production servers handling trades in equity, currencies, debt instruments, derivatives, and mutual funds.
  • Achieved a 25-fold improvement in backup and restore times, reducing end-of-day consolidation from hours to minutes with MySQL Enterprise Backup, giving DBAs greater flexibility for system cleaning and preparation for morning trading activity.
  • Gained full visibility of core trading engine performance by providing managers with statistics, charts, and tracing of order processing activity, using MySQL Enterprise Monitor, critical for ensuring uninterrupted movement of thousands of transactions per second.
  • Granted developers and administrators 24/7 access to Oracle product engineering expertise by subscribing to MySQL Premier Support, securing peace of mind concerning seamless operation of the critical trading platform.
  • Ensured constant access to the core trading engine's reference data - masters, instruments, price bands, ranges, and formula - by loading it from the core MySQL database into the memory of each stock exchange application, thus facilitating smooth running of trade and order management.

Why MySQL Enterprise Edition?

"We chose MySQL Enterprise Edition for its unprecedented level of reliability and stability in comparison to other database engines as well as for its first-class support. I would blindly recommend it to anyone looking for a platform to support their mission-critical business," said Vijukumar Pillai, Senior GM, IT Infrastructure & Projects, BSE Limited

Implementation

BSE requested a proof of concept to compare MySQL Enterprise Edition to the MySQL Community Edition. The proof of concept was conducted in March 2019, demonstrated compelling advantages and prompting BSE to purchase 90 licenses in April 2019.

The roll out began immediately, with partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) collaborating at customer site with the BSE project team and Oracle Premier Support, contributing database sizing and configuration advice.

MySQL was implemented on about 100 servers: distributed across production, development, simulation, and disaster recovery site. The switch from MySQL Community Edition to MySQL Enterprise Edition 5.7 was concurrent with a move from Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.X to 7.X.

The new trading platform went live in December 2019 and currently handle millions of trades per day across all of the exchange's product offerings.

Future MySQL Products

When moving to MySQL Enterprise Edition 8, BSE is planning to implement MySQL Replication, whereby data will be replicated from the primary site to the disaster recovery site within the trading system itself. Currently, production data is replicated to peripheral systems, including the risk management system. This will facilitate scale-out, data security, analysis, and compliance.

About BSE Limited

BSE, formerly known as Bombay Stock Exchange, was established in 1875 and is today's India's leading exchange group with a broad shareholder base that includes Deutsche Bourse as a strategic partner. Besides running the world's fastest trading system, BSE provides a host of other services, including risk management, clearing, settlement, market data services, and education. Its systems and processes are designed to safeguard market integrity, drive the growth of the Indian capital market, as well as stimulate innovation and competition across all market segments.

Among scores of awards it won the Centre of Recognition & Excellence IT Genius Award 2017 in the category 'Data Centre Excellence'.

To learn more about BSE Limited, visit https://www.bseindia.com