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Our Database Was Too ‘Dumb’: How Breaking This Ritual Made Our Payment API 3x Faster
Moving Business Logic to SQL Improved Our API Response Time by 300%
See: Your payment processing platform is handling end-of-month payroll transfers for multinational companies. Thousands of international transfers are being processed, employees are waiting for their salaries, and your API response times are creeping up. This was us last year…. watching our carefully created N-Tier architecture struggle under load. Reason? A seemingly innocent decision we’d made years ago:
` keeping all business logic in our application layer `
For years, we’ve been told to keep our databases dumb. “The database is just for storing data,” they said. But at scale, this conventional wisdom was costing us precious milliseconds we couldn’t afford. This isn’t just another performance optimization thing actually — it’s about challenging established practices when reality demands it (Think!)
Our Payment Processing Challenge
What we were facing in our payment platform is that every international transfer needs to calculate its final amount, accounting for exchange rates, transfer fees, intermediary bank charges, and compliance requirements.
