New Kx Release Offers Improved Performance
from STP Zone, March 7, 2006

The Kdb+ v.2.3 database for Linux, Windows and Solaris has been enhanced in response to client demand, the vendor says.

Kx Systems, provider of databases and time series analysis, has released the Kdb+ v.2.3 database for Linux, Windows and Solaris operating systems. Kx now supports Solaris on Intel, adding to its existing support for Solaris on SPARC. According to Kx, the new release offers improved performance, facilitates the storage and retrieval of complex data types, and allows users to extract maximum processing power from next generation multi-core chips. Customers can download and install Kdb+ v.2.3 without having to rewrite any code or alter any data, stpzone.com understands.

Kx Systems has enhanced Kdb+ database, introduced in 2003, in response to client demand, Simon Garland told stpzone.com. “All of our clients have to do more, all of them have to become faster and faster.” He adds: “Any financial firm trading in today’s high volume capital markets wants to make their existing hardware work more efficiently.

Originally designed to capture, analyse, compare, and store high volumes of data at high speeds, Kdb+ v.2.3 now has added multithreaded capabilities to make it easy for developers to take advantage of parallel processing without changing their code, explains Garland. “If you’re interested in correlating timelines of many hundreds of stocks against each other you can do that in real-time which puts you way a head of your competition.”

Kdb+ v.2.3 offers interoperability with existing versions of the product and can be used on 32 and 64 bit platforms, allowing more efficient storage and retrieval of character and nested data and the ability to analyse data sets simultaneously instead of sequentially. Garland comments: “If it’s all in one database you can do incredibly fast analysis; ours is a unified solution. Kx has streaming, historical and real-time data all in one architecture, so you don’t have to try to cobble them all together.” Kdb+ v.2.3 can process more than one million inserts per second, Garland continues: “If there is a terrorist attack, for instance, or an earthquake in Japan which causes trading to go through the roof, if you can handle one million inserts per second you can stay far ahead of the competition, because you have the ability to handle the sudden extreme increase in volume.

According to Garland the exponential growth in market data is forcing databases to become more sophisticated. “A lot of data is unclean data or ‘noise’. If you have a system clever enough to look at everything and pick out exactly what you want, when you need it, that is a major competitive advantage,” he concludes.

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