Database management for financial services, where the ledger has to be right
In finance a slow query is an inconvenience and a wrong balance is an incident. The work here is weighted toward integrity, recoverability, and being able to prove both.
What changes here
Database Management in finance is not the same engagement
Integrity enforced in the database, not in the application
Constraints, isolation levels, and transaction boundaries chosen deliberately — because an application-level rule is one deployment away from being bypassed.
Point-in-time recovery measured, not assumed
Restores rehearsed to a specific second, with the elapsed time recorded, so the recovery objective in your policy is one you have actually met.
Reconciliation designed in
Balances and movements checkable against source systems on a schedule, so a discrepancy surfaces the same day rather than at month end.
What the regime actually requires
Financial records carry retention, immutability, and access-evidence obligations that shape storage and backup design as much as performance does.
- Non-rewritable retention for records covered by SEC Rule 17a-4, including backups
- Encryption at rest with documented key custody and rotation
- Access logging at the row or object level for customer financial information under GLBA
- Change control over schema migrations, with segregation of duties in the deployment path
The work itself
Full database management pagePerformance tuning and query optimization
Slow-query analysis, index and plan work, connection pooling, and caching — measured against your real workload rather than a synthetic benchmark.
Migrations, upgrades, and platform moves
Version upgrades, on-premise to cloud, and engine changes run with dual-write or replication, a verified row count, and a rollback path.
Schema design and data modelling
Normalization where integrity matters and denormalization where reads do, with constraints and migrations version-controlled alongside the application.
High availability and replication
Primary/replica topologies, automatic failover, and read scaling, with the failover path exercised rather than documented and forgotten.
Backup, retention, and tested restore
Point-in-time recovery, retention set against your obligations, and restore drills that produce an actual number for how long it takes.
Monitoring and managed DBA cover
Query, lock, replication-lag, and capacity alerting, with a named engineer for the escalations that arrive at 2am.
Finance questions we get asked
Something more specific? Send us the situation and we’ll answer it straight.