Orbitly deleted 14 pipelines in a quarter
How a fintech team replaced nightly batch jobs with six materialized views.
Orbitly runs card programs for 300 fintech brands. In January their data team maintained 14 nightly pipelines that copied transactions, balances and disputes into a warehouse. By April they had deleted all of them.
Six views instead of fourteen jobs
Each pipeline existed to keep one table fresh enough for one dashboard. In Basalt each became a SQL view over the same ordered log, updated on every event instead of every night.
Balances are current to the second, not to 02:00.
Dispute queues refresh as chargebacks arrive.
Finance reconciles against the same numbers support sees.
We stopped arguing about which number was right. There is only one number now.
The result
Warehouse spend fell 38%, the on-call rotation for data went from weekly pages to none in the quarter, and the risk team now blocks suspicious cards inside the authorization window.
More from the engine room.
How we cut p99 from 11 ms to 4.2 ms
Three changes to the read path in v4.0: declared sort keys, a per-core allocator and a planner that stopped re-sorting partitions at query time.
Exactly-once without two-phase commit
Idempotent sinks, epoch fencing and a 64-bit sequence per partition. No coordinator, no stalls.
Time travel is just a really good index
Why AS OF queries on 30 days of history cost less than one extra replica.
