FlatexDEGIRO SE Enhances Trading Resilience and Operational Efficiency with MariaDB

About FlatexDEGIRO

FlatexDEGIRO SE is one of Europe’s leading online brokers and financial technology providers. Founded in 1999, the company operates across 16 European countries, employs approximately 1,300 people and serves more than three million customers.

Through its mobile and web platforms, FlatexDEGIRO SE provides access to a broad range of financial products and services, including equities, funds, exchange-traded products (ETPs), crypto trading and pension products.

Behind these services sits a highly complex technology environment where database performance, availability and resilience are critical. In financial markets, even small delays can affect the customer experience, while downtime during periods of high trading activity is simply not an option.

The Challenge

Modernising a Complex Database Environment Built Around 30 MySQL Clusters

For years, FlatexDEGIRO SE operated approximately 30 MySQL clusters supporting more than 400 applications. As the organisation grew, however, the complexity of this legacy environment began to create significant operational friction. Replication delays and inefficient queries introduced latency during critical trading windows, while the overhead of maintaining dozens of independent clusters on ageing systems became unsustainable. Furthermore, complex cross-schema dependencies hindered updates and increased the risk of systemic impact during changes.

To maintain its competitive edge as a leading financial institution, FlatexDEGIRO SE needed to modernise its infrastructure. The primary objectives were to eliminate replication lag, consolidate its disparate database estate, and strengthen high availability, security, and auditing. Ultimately, the company required a scalable architecture capable of supporting future datacenter migrations without disrupting essential customer trading services.

Why MariaDB?

Enterprise-Grade Availability, Intelligent Routing and Greater Operational Control

Operating within the highly regulated financial services sector, FlatexDEGIRO SE required a solution that offered far more than a simple database replacement. The platform needed to deliver enterprise-grade high availability, rigorous security controls, and predictable low-latency transaction routing to support stringent auditing and compliance requirements. After evaluating several high-availability architectures, including Galera-based configurations, FlatexDEGIRO SE selected MariaDB Enterprise Platform as the foundation for its modernised environment, primarily due to the superior level of operational control it provides.

A key differentiator in this selection was MariaDB’s intelligent proxy capabilities, which allow the infrastructure team to direct master access, provide dedicated routing, and balance transactions according to specific workload requirements. This ensures that transactions reach the appropriate database resources efficiently while maintaining detailed auditing and database-level security controls essential for a regulated banking environment. Furthermore, MariaDB Enterprise Platform presented a unique opportunity to radically simplify the company’s infrastructure by consolidating 30 independent MySQL clusters into two resilient primary clusters designed to support both frontend and backend services.

This streamlined architecture not only reduces complexity but also provides a flexible foundation for future growth. The system allows for the seamless expansion of database capacity and facilitates the migration of infrastructure between datacenters with minimal impact on applications or essential trading services. By choosing MariaDB, FlatexDEGIRO SE has secured a scalable, high-performance environment capable of supporting its more than three million customers across Europe while meeting all regulatory and operational demands.

The Solution

Moving 400+ Applications to MariaDB Enterprise Platform in a Single Weekend

Following extensive planning and analysis beginning in 2022, FlatexDEGIRO SE executed a massive migration of its core banking database environment to MariaDB Enterprise Platform over a single weekend maintenance window. This ambitious transformation involved moving more than 400 critical applications and their associated customer data from a legacy environment, all while ensuring that services remained fully prepared for the subsequent trading period. By stopping legacy systems, migrating data, and transitioning hundreds of services before bringing the platform back online, the team achieved a complete database overhaul with zero business interruption.

The resulting architecture replaced the previous 30-server environment with a streamlined 12-node MariaDB Enterprise Server deployment, successfully reducing the infrastructure footprint by 60%. This new foundation relies on two primary database clusters supported by inter-cluster replication to maintain continuous availability, while intelligent traffic management optimises response times by distributing workloads and controlling master transactions. Furthermore, the integration of advanced auditing and security controls meets stringent European financial requirements, providing a scalable and resilient platform where new nodes can be introduced as demand grows without disrupting customer-facing services.

The Impact

The move to MariaDB Enterprise Platform has transformed the way FlatexDEGIRO SE operates its database infrastructure.

Consolidating the environment from 30 servers to 12 has dramatically simplified the database estate, resulting in 60% reduction in infrastructure footprint. The smaller footprint reduces infrastructure requirements while lowering the maintenance burden on FlatexDEGIRO SE’s technology teams.

Historical replication delays that previously created performance bottlenecks have been eliminated. Removing these delays has improved the responsiveness of database-dependent applications and helped provide customers with a faster, more consistent trading experience. Across the scale of FlatexDEGIRO SE’s transaction environment, these improvements have translated into substantial cumulative time savings.

Most importantly, FlatexDEGIRO SE reports 100% platform uptime since the migration, with no database-related outages. The resilience of the new architecture was demonstrated during periods of exceptional global market activity. In November 2024, during the US presidential election, volatility drove extremely high levels of trading activity, and outages affected other platforms, but FlatexDEGIRO SE remained fully operational.

Maintaining availability at such a critical moment did more than protect the existing customer experience. It also helped the business attract new customers looking for a trading platform they could rely on when markets were moving most.

Future Outlook

Building an Infrastructure Ready for the Next Stage of Growth

FlatexDEGIRO SE is already looking ahead to the next phase of its infrastructure strategy, including a planned move to a new datacenter facility.

The flexibility of MariaDB Enterprise Platform means new database nodes can be integrated into the environment while traffic is intelligently redirected across available resources. This gives FlatexDEGIRO SE the ability to evolve its physical infrastructure without interrupting trading services.

For a financial platform serving more than three million customers across Europe, that combination of resilience, scalability and operational flexibility that MariaDB Enterprise Platform provides is a foundation for continued growth.