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.
Sigrún leads the query engine team in Reykjavík. Before Basalt she worked on storage at a Nordic payments company, where she learned to distrust any latency number without a percentile next to it.
