Stac Releases New Market Data Benchmark With Results From Kx And Oracle

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22nd June 2010, 04:56am - Views: 1199





Business Company Kx Systems, Oracle And STAC 1 image

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MEDIA RELEASE PR40100


STAC Releases New Market Data Benchmark With Results From Kx and Oracle


NEW YORK, June 21 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --


    The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC(R)) today released

STAC-M3TM Benchmark results for a solution from Kx Systems and Oracle

Corporation. STAC-M3 provides a common measuring methodology for solutions

that manage large timeseries datasets (tick databases). The measurement

standard is currently a community proposal developed by the STAC Benchmark


organizations and vendors. The Council defines a series of standard

benchmarks for capital market workloads, though interestingly only trading

organizations - and not vendors - can approve specific tests, which ensures

the benchmarks have relevance to real-world trading demands. To complete the

inaugural benchmark testing on timeseries data, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) worked

with Kx Systems, using Kx's kdb+. The results have now set the standard for

a series of benchmark tests to be carried out over the next few months.


    The ability to quickly analyze timeseries of price and trade data is

crucial for firms which trade financial instruments such as stocks,

currencies, options and other derivatives. The growth of high-frequency

trading makes it important for firms to rapidly store, retrieve and analyze

massive quantities of data in order to back-test new trading algorithms,

monitor their risk, and satisfy regulatory demands. At the same time, surging

data volumes brought about by computerized trading make these tasks

increasingly challenging in markets which can 'tick' (publish changes to

prices) millions of times per second.


    Peter Lankford, founder & director of STAC, said: "We're pleased that Kx

and Oracle have taken the lead in publishing STAC-M3 Benchmarks. This testing

responds to a direct need for performance data expressed by some of the

world's leading financial institutions. We look forward to further benchmark

results from Kx and Oracle, as well as other vendors of software and hardware

that can be used for managing large timeseries of data."


    Simon Garland, Kx chief strategist, said: "We have worked closely with

STAC and Oracle to create benchmarks. Going forward, the benchmarks will give

financial institutions clearly defined criteria for measuring the performance

of their systems. When setting up large, critical databases people need to be

sure that the configuration they use is delivering the best possible

performance within their hardware and software constraints. The problem is

nobody has the time and resources to do an in-depth evaluation of all the

alternatives and ideally to regularly revisit the chosen solution. These new

benchmarks from STAC are valuable components of these decisions."


    This series of tests is designed to set a standard for future benchmarks

to be carried out by STAC in conjunction with various vendors. The results

are vital for financial institutions needing to address their CEP

requirements, facing the pressures of constantly increasing data volumes and

regulatory demands. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is the first benchmark

standard for market data timeseries (tick) databases, allowing vendors to

measure their performance and financial institutions to test their own

systems.


Business Company Kx Systems, Oracle And STAC 3 image

    The STAC-M3 Benchmark standards will accelerate market selection of new

technologies by enabling user firms and vendors to measure the performance of

their database solutions in a common way. Trading firms will be able to

quickly assess the benefit of innovations at all layers of the tick-database

'stack' including application software, operating systems, processors,

servers, and storage architectures.


    Amir Halfon, Oracle's senior director of financial services technology,

added: "Oracle's unique storage server, the Sun Fire X4540, allowed us to

achieve extreme performance with Kx by placing the data as close to the CPUs

as possible. The Sun Fire X4540 provides fast, high throughput access between

the threads of execution and the storage subsystem, offering up to 96TB of

storage in a compact, cost-effective package. The tight integration between

compute and storage within the Sun Fire X4540 eliminates the need for an

external SAN and provides an ideal platform for high-performance analytics

solutions such as Kx kdb+."


    The STAC-verified benchmarks were carried out using Kx kdb+ v2.6 on the

Oracle Sun Fire X4540 storage server using version 0.92 of the STAC-M3

Benchmark specifications. STAC-M3 v0.92 has been submitted to the full

Council for ratification, and a vote is pending.


    The benchmark report is available at http://www.STACresearch.com/kx.


    Notes to editors


    About STAC




    About Oracle




    About Kx


    Kx offers a unified approach to real-time and historical data analysis

with its high-performance kdb+ database platform. kdb+ provides a portable

64-bit implementation of our expressive query and programming language to

analyze and store streaming events, manipulate in-memory and on-disk

databases, and build distributed low-latency applications.


    Our focus is on delivering the best performance and

flexibility for high-volume, data-intensive analytics and applications. We

built the technology. You build your business. For more information visit



    Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or

its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.


    

    Editorial Contacts:

    John Norris

    Moonlight Media

    Tel: +44(0)20-7250-4770

    +44(0)7774-777-597

    Email: john@moonlightmedia.co.uk


    SOURCE: Kx Systems, Oracle and STAC


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