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Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

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Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#11

I wonder why you would need to add engineers to scale an automated trading platform. Extra features, sure. But scaling? Shouldn't be an issue if things are reasonably designed.

So about a year before the crazy growth I interviewed there. Their platform at the time was on heroku and all the services were managed services.

So ya they had a ton of tech debt to deal with to handle hyper growth.

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#13

I wonder why you would need to add engineers to scale an automated trading platform. Extra features, sure. But scaling? Shouldn't be an issue if things are reasonably designed.

A large class of features are necessary for scaling: those that automate something that previously required a support call. Handling all the KYC verification for every state and country, for example, takes a lot of engineering.

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#14
post #12

I was hoping for something like "don't use an AP NoSQL database for storing your financial transactions". I've always wondered how and why they chose MongoDB.

Coinbase was founded in 2012 in peak mongodb hype, and while the issues with MongoDB are well understood today, six years ago you'd have to be a cutting edge emerging database type developer to know that, and that's not the type of person who Y Combinator likes to fund.

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#15
post #12

I was hoping for something like "don't use an AP NoSQL database for storing your financial transactions". I've always wondered how and why they chose MongoDB.

What's the best current alternative database for storing financial transactions? Just use a SQL over a NoSQL?

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#16
post #15
post #12

I was hoping for something like "don't use an AP NoSQL database for storing your financial transactions". I've always wondered how and why they chose MongoDB.

What's the best current alternative database for storing financial transactions? Just use a SQL over a NoSQL?

Probably OneTick.

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#17
post #12

I was hoping for something like "don't use an AP NoSQL database for storing your financial transactions". I've always wondered how and why they chose MongoDB.

Coinbase was founded in 2012 in peak mongodb hype, and while the issues with MongoDB are well understood today, six years ago you'd have to be a cutting edge emerging database type developer to know that, and that's not the type of person who Y Combinator likes to fund.

I don't know; it sure seems like people understood the issues in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636198

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#18
post #15
post #12

I was hoping for something like "don't use an AP NoSQL database for storing your financial transactions". I've always wondered how and why they chose MongoDB.

What's the best current alternative database for storing financial transactions? Just use a SQL over a NoSQL?

PostgreSQL all the way down. I know I'm in the minority here.

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#19
post #15
post #12

I was hoping for something like "don't use an AP NoSQL database for storing your financial transactions". I've always wondered how and why they chose MongoDB.

What's the best current alternative database for storing financial transactions? Just use a SQL over a NoSQL?

NoSQL is a meaningless term, and SQL is a query language. The actual database types are relational, key-value/wide-column, document store, graph, search, OLAP/column-oriented, etc.

Any of them will work as long as you can durably store your data. Relational databases have always implemented ACID and SQL which makes them easy to work with, and they can support almost any data model with decades of updates and tooling which is why they are the default choice unless you specifically have other needs. Newer relational databases can also scale horizontally by applying the same sharding techniques as the other database types, so even that issue is no longer relevant.

Re: Lessons from Coinbase’s Wild Ascent

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase was founded in 2012 in peak mongodb hype, and while the issues with MongoDB are well understood today, six years ago you'd have to be a cutting edge emerging database type developer to know that, and that's not the type of person who Y Combinator likes to fund.

I don't know; it sure seems like people understood the issues in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636198

I still don't understand them past "no PK/FK integrity" and duplicating data + problems with complicated queries.
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