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 app faced high availability and performance challenges during peak periods.
The Challenges: User Demand Surges Leading to Operational Hurdles
During the initial assessment, MNC Bank faced critical challenges that hindered its ability to deliver optimal logistics solutions. These included:
Low Throughput During Peak Traffic
MariaDB, 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.
Lengthy Backup and Restore Processes
MariaDB required 20 minutes to perform backups and over 3 hours to restore data, which posed a significant risk to business continuity. The time-intensive process could result in extended downtime during emergencies or system updates.
Non-Compliance with Disaster Recovery (DR) Strategies
MNC Bank lacked a robust disaster recovery mechanism. No automation or replication tool was in place to ensure database availability during outages, leaving the bank vulnerable to data loss or prolonged downtimes.
Poor End-User Experience
The limitations of MariaDB directly impacted Motion Apps’ performance. Slow loading times between menus and inconsistent functionality led to a subpar experience for end-users, undermining customer satisfaction and retention.
Limited Observability and Monitoring
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 effectively diagnose issues, optimize performance, or audit database activities.
Figure 1: Original Data Architecture
The Solution: Transforming Legacy Infrastructure into a Future-Ready, High-Performance Database System
MNC Bank successfully migrated its Motion Apps database from MariaDB to TiDB with minimal downtime, ensuring operational continuity. The migration was executed in a structured three-phase approach
Planning
First, the team conducted a comprehensive analysis to understand 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 then 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. The entire cutover was completed with only 3 hours of downtime, thanks to precise coordination, automated migration processes, and extensive pre-cutover testing.
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 2: The new architecture of MNC Bank
The cluster consists of 3 Placement Driver (PD) nodes, 3 TiKV nodes, 2 TiDB nodes, and 1 dedicated monitoring node. The PD nodes act as the cluster’s metadata manager, maintaining the global view of the cluster and ensuring efficient scheduling and load balancing. The 3 TiKV nodes serve as the distributed storage layer, storing data in a highly available and fault-tolerant manner, while the 2 TiDB nodes handle SQL parsing, execution, and client connections, ensuring continuous availability even if one node goes down. The monitoring node runs Prometheus and Grafana 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 legacy MariaDB database. This approach ensured a smooth transition while maintaining data consistency and reducing downtime during the switchover. The bank established a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy in the second phase 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
Faced with scalability and reliability challenges, MNC Bank turned to TiDB to enhance its mobile banking operations. These were the results they saw:
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 process, once taking 20 minutes, is now completed in just 2 minutes. Similarly, data restoration time dropped from over 3 hours 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 operational efficiency and resilience by resolving long-standing challenges — such as limited observability, slow backup and restore processes, low throughput during peak periods, and insufficient disaster recovery. 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 empowers MNC Bank to manage growing transaction volumes effortlessly and continuously 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.
