Elevate modern apps with TiDB.
Since 1989, MNC Bank (PT Bank MNC Internasional Tbk) has been a leading Indonesian private bank known for its tech-driven innovation. Now part of the MNC Group, it serves individual and business customers with various financial products.
Motion Apps, the bank’s flagship mobile platform, offers features like biometric login, real-time notifications, and seamless fund transfers. As user demand surged, the bank needed to improve the Apps reliability and performance mostly during peak periods.
A Journey to Database Operational Improvements
MNC Bank was on a journey to improve mobile banking performance and reliability from several perspectives, including its database. It needed to handle high traffic, such as month-end transactions, payout days, and promotion days, to ensure operations would run smoothly without any disruptions to the end-user experience.
The company’s legacy database struggled to handle high-traffic periods, such as month-end transactions, where workloads increased to 10x. Initially, the system supported just 1 QPS during regular operations, but severe bottlenecks were encountered during peak periods, adversely affecting the user experience.
As part of the mobile banking transformation program, before implementing TiDB, the bank relied on basic monitoring tools like Grafana to observe server performance and transaction workload (QPS). This lack of comprehensive observability made it difficult to diagnose issues effectively, optimize performance, or audit database activities.
The Solution: Transforming into a Future-Ready, High-Performance Database System
MNC Bank successfully migrated its Motion Apps database to TiDB with minimal downtime, ensuring operational continuity. The migration was executed in two weeks using a structured three-phase approach: Planning, Testing, and Production Cut-over.
Planning
First, the team conducted a comprehensive analysis to understand the differences in schema design, SQL compatibility, and system performance. They set up a TiDB test environment to simulate production workloads, validate schema compatibility, and benchmark query performance.
Testing
Over two weeks, the team rigorously tested critical queries, stored procedures, and business logic on TiDB’s distributed SQL architecture. They used automated data migration tools like TiDB Lightning and TiDB Dumpling to transfer data, reducing the risk of manual errors. Extensive load testing and failover simulations were performed to verify high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities.
Final Cutover
The final cutover phase was executed during a carefully scheduled maintenance window to minimize disruption to end users. Using a well-coordinated switchover plan, the migration team transferred the final batch of data changes and switched production traffic to the new TiDB cluster. Thanks to precise coordination, automated migration processes, and extensive pre-cutover testing, the entire cutover was completed with only 3 hours of downtime.
Migrating to TiDB has enabled MNC Bank to benefit from a highly available, distributed SQL database with improved scalability, enhanced fault tolerance, and real-time analytics support. This upgrade future-proofs the bank’s infrastructure, allowing it to handle larger transaction volumes and deliver faster query response times — crucial for modern, data-driven financial services.
Solution Data Architecture
The deployment topology for MNC Bank’s TiDB cluster is designed to provide high availability, scalability, and disaster recovery, as illustrated below.
Figure 1: The new architecture of MNC Bank
The production cluster consists of a multi-node cluster to guarantee a highly available and fault-tolerant cluster, this multi-node deployment ensures continuous availability even if one node goes down. The cluster is also equipped with out of the box monitoring tools to provide real-time visibility into the cluster’s health, performance, and resource usage.
The production deployment process was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, MNC Bank utilized TiCDC (TiDB Change Data Capture) to mirror real-time changes from the TiDB Cluster to the original database. This approach ensured a smooth transition while maintaining data consistency and reducing downtime during the switchover. In the second phase, the bank established a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy by configuring TiCDC to replicate changes from the primary TiDB cluster to a secondary TiDB cluster at the DR site. This setup ensures that, in the event of a failure at the primary site, the DR site remains in sync and ready to take over with minimal data loss. This topology provides MNC Bank with a fault-tolerant, distributed database system that supports real-time replication and cross-site disaster recovery, ensuring business continuity and supporting high-volume financial transactions.
The Results: Measurable Improvements with TiDB
These were the results MNC Bank experienced by enhancing its mobile banking apps with TiDB:
10x Throughput During Peak Traffic
The transition to TiDB has empowered MNC Bank to handle a tenfold increase in query throughput during peak traffic periods. Even during month-end transaction surges, the enhanced system capacity ensures seamless operations, eliminating performance bottlenecks and maintaining a smooth user experience.
Significantly Faster Backup and Restore
TiDB’s robust infrastructure drastically reduced backup and restore times. The backup time decreased by 90% and is now completed in just 2 minutes. Similarly, data restoration time dropped by 92% to only 15 minutes. This improvement minimizes downtime and ensures rapid recovery during emergencies, enhancing overall operational resilience.
Robust Disaster Recovery Compliance
By implementing TiCDC for real-time replication, the bank has ensured that the disaster recovery (DR) site remains in sync with the primary system. This robust DR strategy significantly bolsters the bank’s resilience, reducing the risk of data loss and minimizing downtime during outages.
Improved End-User Experience
The enhancements in backend performance directly translate to a superior end-user experience on Motion Apps. The platform now enjoys a 50% reduction in latency, resulting in faster loading times and more consistent performance. This has led to noticeable improvements in customer satisfaction, as highlighted by the CTO’s commendation of the app’s enhanced performance.
Enhanced Observability and Monitoring
Before adopting TiDB, MNC Bank relied solely on a basic Grafana dashboard to monitor server performance and transaction workloads (QPS). With TiDB, the bank now benefits from an extensive monitoring system that tracks all SQL queries—including slow queries—in real time. This advanced visibility allows the team to drill down into execution plans and detailed query information (user, IP, execution time, duration, and frequency), significantly strengthening their auditing and performance optimization processes.
Conclusion
The deployment of TiDB has fundamentally transformed MNC Bank’s mobile banking operations. The bank now enjoys unprecedented performance, operational efficiency and resilience. With a 10x increase in throughput, drastically reduced downtime, and enhanced monitoring capabilities, TiDB has modernized the performance and reliability of the Motion Apps platform.
This scalable, highly available infrastructure allows MNC Bank to manage growing transaction volumes effortlessly while continuing to meet evolving customer demands. The dramatic improvements in user experience and system performance underscore TiDB’s value as a transformative database solution.
If you’re ready to explore how TiDB can deliver similar results for your enterprise, we’d love to discuss your needs and goals.
