Case Study: Novus Partners achieves 45x faster ETL and 10x compute scale with MemSQL

Novus - Customer Case Study

Novus is a portfolio intelligence platform used by 100+ top investment managers and institutional investors to analyze public and private investment data across about $2 trillion in assets. As Novus scaled, their ETL process became a constant operational headache—requiring near 24/7 monitoring, causing daytime application slowdowns when loads failed, and being limited by a database that couldn’t scale without invasive sharding and code changes.

Novus reworked its pipeline to use MemSQL as the persistent store behind a distributed Scala compute layer, enabling high-intensity computations to be available immediately. Load times fell from 90 minutes to 2 minutes (≈45x faster), Scala workers grew from 12 to 126, performance became predictable with scale achieved by adding servers (no code changes), JSON and MySQL-protocol support smoothed developer adoption, and operations reduced to a single DBA for a few hours a week.

Novus Partners

Noah Zucker

Vice President of Tactical Engineering