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Comment by bluestreak | Hacker News Reader

I was there in Aug 2019 and I did hear them talking about mongo, There was a programme at the time to "refactor" their estate, a part of that they wanted to replace bunch of ad-hoc databases with clunky- or no data governance with one (or fewer) central places, which will be under Data IT control. The rationale was to reduce risk of data loss, leak or general business continuity issue in what was 6-12 month project.

The cost of architecting relational model that would be cover for 65 mini databases in a bank will be astronomical. It is far easier to setup no-SQL entry point that would auto-conform for whatever requirements upstream applications might have.

It is a technical win for Mongo, but I don't believe this is an attempt by HSBC to get up to speed with database trends. HSBC are removing internal audit strikes, nothing more than that.

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"auto-conform" is a bit of a rich phrase, up there with "schema-less" and "my data doesn't fit in tables"

Not to sound pedantic or old or curmudgeonly (because while I'm 45, I was already curmudgeonly and reading Fabian Pascal when I was 28). But c'mon.

All data has a schema, it just takes effort to discover it. A relational database is a set of facts about the world. Lack of effort in finding that schema and normalizing data, "conforming" it... it means effort from very frustrated people who have to clean up the mess later and make it conform.

FWIW SQL can seem like a clunky and dated way to talk about data. It is. But it's not the relational model's fault, it's SQLs's. Going "NoSQL" simply makes data modeling problems worse. It pushes the problem til later, and pushes reasoning about the data into places where it shouldn't have to be. Even more so when the underyling data storage tech is dubious, like Mongo appears to be.

>The cost of architecting relational model that would be cover for 65 mini databases in a bank will be astronomical.

But they already have relational models, right? Can't you port the DDL over to centrally managed instances?

We are working with HSBC and have not heard about Mongo being a thing despite working on data with them. What location and department were you in if you don't mind saying?

This was in London HSBC HQ, Equities

Fascinating. Are they intending to use this for core transactional workloads? How do they intend to deal with Mongo's (many) known consistency issues?

I have not worked on this project, so I don't have details. Mongo is in a nutshell to replace a database trader setup under their desk and that grew quite important. There is nothing pretty about that. I'm quite sure they will have issues and workarounds for years to come :(

Incredible -- was this under-the-desk database fairly recent or quite a while ago? I'd love to hear the story if you or someone else familiar with it is willing to share.

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