What's the best DB to store banking transactions?

Question

We are planning to create a web app to store banking transactions for customers, e.g purchases, transfers etc and allow them to tag / categorize each transaction.

Could someone point us to the best DB for this purpose? It needs to scale horizontally and we also need to perform analysis on all transactions.

Thanks

Answer 1

The best database to store banking transactions is the one the banks use, DB2/z.

But, since I doubt you'd be able to afford a System z mainframe, that's probably not an option. That doesn't make it any less the best database of course.

If, however, you're talking about storing transaction for Joe Bloggs or Dodgy Brothers Rug Emporium (as opposed to the two hundred million or so customers of ICBC), pretty well any database will be up to the task - Oracle (despite its inability to differentiate NULLs from empty strings), SQL Server, MySQL PostgreSQL, even SQLite probably.

Answer 2

I'm going to start this by saying its almost impossible to recommend a system based on what you've described. It could be for such a varied number of uses, ranging from mission critical real time financial data that needs to be there and needs to be accurate, through to a web app that sucks in financial records from a bank/credit card statement and lets the user annotate them, in which case it isn't as sensitive.

If you're storing mission critical, sensitive data, I'd go with a commercial option that includes significant support. Also a DBA would be a good idea.

Oracle or MS SQL would be my inclination, and probably Oracle over MS SQL, over because of its multi-platform support. If you're happy to run on Windows then MS SQL is fine.

If you're storing existing transactions that can be tagged (ala Blippy), then any database would be sufficient. If you're thinking of scaling this out to the n'th degree, you might like one of the document database flavours of the month, (MongoDB, Couch etc).

Really I think the question should be reconsidered from the context of what your application will do, not that it happens to do it with financial data. The fact that financial data may require additional security, or additional accuracy checks, that forms part of what the system will do, as does the way the user interacts with your web app etc.