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by Przemek Tomczak
Many industry observers believe that we’re in the middle of another industrial revolution. We’re seeing the digitalization of business processes and operations, and transformation in how goods and services are designed, produced, and delivered. As part of this transformation, organizations are moving to self-healing systems where automation is used to reconfigure networks, systems, and processes improving availability, reliability and quality of their services and products. Together with the exponential growth of data from sensors and connected devices, organizations have to manage the increasing pace of change in configurations and the relationships between devices, users, and business processes.
In order to be able to gain business insights and make decisions in this rapidly changing environment, organizations have to represent data from their assets and environments across many dimensions of time. This also involves multiple data sources that need to be correlated, analyzed and aggregated. This is necessary in order to able to answer questions such as:
It is striking how similar these questions and challenges are to the time-series data management and analytics challenges that the capital markets industry has had to address over the past 20 years. In particular, the ability to go back in history and replay trading activity, stock splits, mergers, and assess whether insider information was used for a particular trade, involving large amount of data has been common. This paper draws on some of these experiences and how KX technology has been applied to address them.
It’s About Time
The reference to time in a system is crucial for identifying and prioritizing what is important, what is changing, and providing context about the objects in an environment, such as assets, sensors, networks, contracts, people and relationships at a particular instant.
How you represent time in a system and its data model is critical to be able to answer the types of questions above. Essentially you need a data model that stores and facilitate analysis of data across two dimensions of time – a bitemporal data model. This model stores more than one timestamp for each property, object, and value, such as:
When working in a real-life environment, you may get corrections to previously processed data, resulting in multiple versions of data for a transaction for a “valid time” period. By storing all of the transaction times and their version information it becomes possible to distinguish between different versions of data for better analysis and decision making. With this information it is possible to run reports or analytics on data at different times and to get the same result. This is critical for investigating issues, regulatory reporting, and having a consistent set of information for making decisions.
For example, in order to make a decision as to whether equipment should be maintained, fixed, replaced or updated with new configuration information, you will need to assess what variables contribute to its performance at different points in time – such as configuration, the environment, as well as quality and performance metrics for the same period in time.
Benefits of bitemporal data models
There are some significant business benefits of bitemporal data models. They enable you to easily and quickly navigate through time as follows.
Implementing bitemporal data models
Organizations that have attempted to implement bitemporal data models with traditional technologies have been faced with some surprises and significant challenges, including:
With KX’s experience in implementing bitemporal data models on high-velocity and high-volume data sets, such as applying complex algorithms to high-volumes of streaming market data to make microsecond trading decisions, we recommend that organizations look at solutions that have the following characteristics:
Case Study Examples
The following are some examples of organizations who have implemented bitemporal data models using KX technology.
Przemek Tomczak is Senior Vice-President Internet of Things and Utilities at KX. Previously, Przemek held senior roles at the Independent Electricity System Operator in Ontario, Canada and top-tier consulting firms and systems integrators. Przemek also has a CPA and a background in business, technology and risk management.