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Column-oriented storage is faster for reading because of the cache efficiency. Looking at your sample query: select price, time from data where symbol = `AAPL Here I'm concerned with three columns: price, time, and symbol. If all ticks were stored by row, the database would have to read through all rows just to search for the symbols. It would look like ...

Specialised NoSQL database systems are used a lot for time series storage, particularly for tick data: Kx / Kdb is one prominent solution; from Arthur Whitney et al who did A+ at Morgan Stanley Onetick is another, newer entrant, which has traces back to Goldman Sachs Voltdb is something by serial database inventer Michael Stonebreaker SciDB is another ...

There are many specialised products for HF tick data. In addition to KDB which you mentioned, there is OneTick, Vertica, Infobright, and some open-source ones like MonetDB etc. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS). My experience is that Column Oriented Databases are overrated when it comes to tick data, because very often you request the ...

I have long hungered for the ultimate, super-fast, super-scaleable data storage solution. I have used relational databases, kdb, flatfiles, and binary files. In the end, I used binary files in my research language of choice. My advice is to KISS. The choice of storage is actually not that critical (unless maybe you're working with options tick data). ...

Personally I make a distinction between two conflicting goals: (1) storing data incoming in real-time for immediate processing and (2) storing the gathered data for "offline" purposes. Such approach makes things a lot easier if we're talking about a home-grown solution. (1) must be as fast as possible but not necessarily scalable beyond a few dozen millions ...

The reason that "traditional" NoSql databases will not get much up take in finance is that they are designed to solve a different problem. Most NoSql databases from the web world are designed with two central design parameters. First key lookups should be very fast. Second is that operations should be atomic at the row level and should not span records. This ...

Few points from my experience: 1 Another filters that you that you should consider is for price = 999 or 999.99 that appears in some data providers. 2 Another set of checks is to look at cross-section of e.g. range = (high-low)/close over all names. Check for the smallest range and largest range to see if the values make sense. You can also check daily % ...

I have been using FastBit for a while now and find it to be quite performant. It's very non-intrusive to your existing binary storage format provided your data is stored in a columnar manner. I have briefly tested Tokyo/KyotoCabinet and didnt find it suitable for my (persistent storage) requirements.

While noble, unfortunately, this type of effort is not very practical. Mostly because market data is a major source of revenue for the market centers and is never simply given away, at least not in intraday form. A few things to consider: Becoming a market data distributor is both costly and entails entering into agreements with each market center. If we ...

Using MySQL for financial data is not unreasonable. But for tick data are you ever going to do anything except a query on a date range? For analyzing tick data in R I generally keep it in a disk file, one tick file per day, and load the files in as I need them. Using .RData files instead of csv files is quicker. I've also used custom C++ classes before, to ...

At discretelogics we just released a file format to store time series in flat files called "TeaFiles". In addition to raw data they can store the binary item layout and a description of the contents. C#, C++, Python APIs are available open source, licensed under the GPL, see discretelogics.com/TeaFiles Using memory mapping, read performance reaches that of ...

I recommend you optimize your SQL implementation instead of going for NoSQL, and throwing more expensive hardware at the problem. Always benchmark first. The reason I'm saying this is that I've seen MS SQL Server scale perfectly fine for options data of the magnitude you're describing and "big number of strikes tables will be enormously long and, hence, ...

I have to think that there are a lot of very fast, very optimized special-purpose accounting engines out there filling this role. Yes and no. I do not think you are high volume at all - you just have a corporate level server for the database, not a cheap low end hosting. I do about 2000 transactions per second on a SQL Server with a mid range ...

A columnar database or No-SQL solution may be your best choice. It depends on which OS you target, what your throughput and latency requirements are and whether you look to persist all data or not and finally how big the size of your data is expected to be. Obviously if you only look to store hourly/daily data then even a database that comprises a year of ...

Dukascopy publish free historical csv tick data but have a convoluted flash widget to access it. This website has a series of tutorial on developing a php script to download and extract all the compressed files. http://4xtutor.com/category/autotrade/market-data/ I have written my own python scripts which I will upload if anyone wants it There are samples ...

I have become a fan of SQLite. It's a very lightweight SQL database, which you can use as an intermediate solution. I agree with Rich C that the best thing to do is probably come up with a custom solution that is optimal for your needs. Using SQLite as persistent storage, and loading the data in memory when you want to do intensive computations on it seems ...

The adjusted close will change after dividends and stock splits. So the old data will have to be replaced by the new. So it is usually a good idea to check for adj close of the downloaded values against current values. I also like to check for downloaded data against some other source (like Google). I do this by writing a unit test that will randomly pick a ...

You need to log some data, and later use it for analysis. Dare I suggest you just append the values to a set of files? You can load up the data later for your runs, and cache anything needed frequently. Frankly buying an SSD and copying the files to that before you run analysis should solve your problem, and no-one had to get hurt.

KDB is useful for two reasons: - Storage of data; and easy access to the data (i.e. querying ticks..etc) - Rich query language that supports many Quant functions however; what KDB does not do well; is the quant query language. I have evaluated KDB, Matlab, and R. So far R is the winner. I have not found any fast solution for storing and retrieving data; ...

I have had success using MySQL to store both OHLCV, Options data and metadata such as earnings dates in MySQL and accessing both for reads and writes from R. For me this works very nicely and is performant for daily data, if you are doing HFT you may want to consider a specialized tickdb, but at daily scales (252 returns per year per ticker - MySQL is ...