Alex Seaton from Man Group presented at QCon London 2025 on transitioning from a high-maintenance MongoDB server farm to a serverless database solution using object storage for hedge fund trading applications. He emphasized the advantages of serverless architecture, including improved storage management and concurrency models, while also addressing challenges like clock drift and the complexities of Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). Key takeaways highlighted the need for careful management of global state and the subtleties involved in using CRDTs and distributed locking mechanisms.

Recall.ai faced significant performance issues with their Postgres database due to the high concurrency of NOTIFY commands used during transactions, which caused global locks and serialized commits, leading to downtime. After investigating, they discovered that the LISTEN/NOTIFY feature did not scale well under their workload of tens of thousands of simultaneous writers. They advise against using LISTEN/NOTIFY in high-write scenarios to maintain database performance and scalability.