Kx Systems, which provides high-performance databases and timeseries analysis, says Unicredit-owned HypoVereinsbank (HVB) has bought a cross-asset database system from the company for its proprietary trading desks in Munich and London. The Kx technology is being used to capture and analyze millions of streaming market ticks for immediate analysis and to perform complex analytics on historical data.
KX Systems explains that its Kdb+tick application lies on top of the kdb+ database to provide multi-asset traders with an accurate and instant view of markets. They can capture and analyze millions of ticks as well as terabytes of historical data and achieve impressively fast results on both, claims the company. The “q” language, designed to deliver fast application and query performance on very large databases and on time-ordered data, was used throughout the entire system to create a unified platform architecture with very low latency between data capture and analysis, it adds in a statement.
“We reviewed several database solutions and no other vendor offered us the ability to process streaming, realtime and historical data within one architecture,” says Thilo Friess, Project Manager, HVB. “We trade multiple asset classes in many different markets and we needed a flexible system with a built-in programming language to make it simple to add additional instruments and expand to more trading desks. Kx beat the other vendors we evaluated in every performance category that was important to us.”
“HVB is the ideal example of how customers performing cross-asset trading in different geographies can use our unified platform and flexible programming language to gain competitive advantage,” says Simon Garland, Kx CTO. “We gave HVB the tools to build a custom system on 64-bit hardware that met the specific requirements of their proprietary trading desks and allowed them to optimize trading opportunities much more quickly than their competition.”