Linux database breaks real time barrier

Kdb Gets Sub-second Response on Billion-Row Databases – Miami, Florida, January 24, 2001 – Kx Systems, a pioneer in high performance vector-based technology, announced today that it has built a multi-billion tick database application that gives traders and analysts a powerful new tool for making investment decisions. Based on Kdb, its ultra-high performance relational database, Kx has built a demonstration version of the solution in partnership with the Concorde Group Ltd., to show at the LinuxWorld Expo in NYC next week. This solution leverages the efficiency of Red Hat Linux and utilizes high performance, high-density compute servers.From the same “break the mold” philosophy that started Linux, Kdb from Kx Systems takes on industry icons like Oracle and IBM with Kdb. Kdb’s unique design optimizes data storage and retrieval, resulting in the ability to perform complex analyses at speeds 10 to 1000 times faster than traditional databases. This improvement in query speed makes it possible to analyze enormous amounts of data in real time.

The tick database application was built in response to requests from financial institutions who are under pressure to bring more powerful predictive tools to the trading floor, particularly tools that use time series analysis that is, look at a stock’s past series of trade and quote prices in consecutive order. Providing real time analysis of this data has become impossible for significant time horizons, because there is simply too much data accumulating too quickly. In this tick database system, Kx gets sub-second query response rates on 2 years of NYSE tick data for all publicly traded stocks – over 2.5 billion trades and quotes.

“Before Kdb, we were waiting 60 to 90 seconds for responses to queries on our system,” says an IT Manager for a large private hedge fund. “I decided to try to speed things up with Kdb, and was able to build a prototype trading system in Kdb in one week that ran 1,000 times faster than what we were running at the time. That convinced us to add a significant historical component to the real time system, and even with billions of rows of tick data our response rates are still out of this world.”

To demonstrate the power of Kdb in this application, Kx Systems (www.kx.com) has partnered with Concorde Group, Ltd. (www.concorde.com) a systems integration company based in Marlborough, Massachusetts to build a demonstration version of the tick database solution. This demo will be given at LinuxWorld Expo in New York City from January 31st through February 2nd at the Jacob K. Javits Center.

Concorde is hosting the Kx historical tick database solution on a loosely coupled Linux Cluster of 50 Pentium CPUs with 50 GB of available memory and up to 300 GB of database storage. The database Cluster is managed via a special Network Engines AdminEngine, which provides for direct out of band remote management of the individual Cluster nodes. The AdminEngine is uniquely suited for management and loading of the tick database demonstrated here, allowing the Cluster to be monitored, managed and viewed from anywhere in the world.

At its booth at LinuxWorld Expo Kx will also be offering demonstrations of other applications built in Kdb, including an eCRM application and a publish and subscribe system on VALinux servers.

About Kx Systems
Kx Systems is a software company that has been serving international firms in finance, insurance and telecom since 1993. Known for innovation and reliability, Kx has defined a new product category in the database world the ultra high-performance relational database system. The Kx customer list includes Zurich Financial Services Group, Telstra Corporation and CIBC-Oppenheimer.