Hello Fineracteers, I discovered Fineract and specially Fineract-cn last week,and am very impressed by the future potential of the project, both to deliveron its original social mission but also to revolutionize commercial FinTechsector the same way the big data wave caught up when Hadoop was open sourced.
The architecture [Cloud Native/micro-services] is at theforefront of what a modern application should look like, and the decision tostart from scratch and don’t carry the burden of legacy was a bold but verysmart move imho. There is however, one area that might be interesting tochallenge: the CQRS and the dual storage engine needed to provide capabilityfor async command execution (and its draw back on error handling from frontend) and sync query accessing the traditional DBMS with its scalabilityshortfall. The current implementation looks optimal when it was picked(I assume when fineract-cn was still mifos io), because there was no opensource “NewSQL” solution available. Using classic RDBMS with known scalabilitylimitation, coupled with NoSQL eventual consistency, no ACID, nomulticolumn/table transaction, no join or grouping, given up to gain stellarhorizontal scalability was a smart move. However, in 2017, Apache released Trafodion as Top LevelProject. It could replace both Postgress/MariaDb/MySQL and Cassandra. It is anMPP RDBMS built on top of Hadoop Hbase (the Hadoop equivalent of Cassandra). Itis fully ACID, supports multicolumn/multi table transactions, joins, group by,is fully horizontally scalable and support all the bells and whistle you wouldexpect from a classic RDBMS. It can be classified as NewSQL, basically claimingback all the things given up by NoSql in exchange for scalability. In addition,the company backing it up (Esgyn Corp) have recently announced that itscommercial product (EsgynDB, derived from Trafodion) is being used for CoreBanking in 2 major Banks in China, struggling with the ever growing mobilepayment volume that traditional scale up databases cannot keep up with. Inaddition Esgyn provides a DB as a service offering, cloud hosted fully managed(Esgyn Strato), giving the option to potential fineract-cn hosting company to“outsource” the persistence layer management and focus on the rest. Wouldn’t it be an interesting idea to hook Trafodion toFineract-cn? I can think of the following advantages: - Simplify persistence layer ecosystem from 2 DB to 1 -> back to classic RDBMS but with full scale out capability MPP style. - Still Apache license compatible - Persistence layer ready to support challenging analytical workload (reporting use cases? - thanks for reclaiming Join/group-by at scale). - Remove the reticence of decision maker to use NoSQL in Core Banking - Performance over Cassandra [on paper, even if Trafodion was used only as a drop in replacement to Cassandra for async commands, the use of Trafodion “Align Format” feature should demonstrate higher performance for journaling, as Trafodion would write 1 BigTable cell per row, while Cassandra or Native Hbase would write 1 X nb Column cells per row]. - With a solid company already showing its commitment to core banking backing the Apache project Hope this makes sense? Eric Owhadi, https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-owhadi-3173058/ Principal Engineer at Esgyn Corporation. message resent from personal email, the first tentative did not make it...
