OneTick

BuzzMeeks · Post by **BuzzMeeks** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 2:27 pm

Anybody have any experience with OneTick? From what I've been told it was developed by a group of Goldmans quants who set up on their own, and OneTick allegedly fills gaps left by kx, vahyu and the like....

brainyoga · Post by **brainyoga** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 12:19 am

I have not experienced onetick first hand, but I have used kdb+ for many years, and have moved around a lot amongst their clients and prospects. What gap do you think has been left by them?

d4vid · Post by **d4vid** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 5:28 pm

I've worked with OneTick and Kx in the past. I'm unsure of the gaps you refer to, but OneTicks use of standard langauage APIs is a plus for some users. What do you need to know?

BuzzMeeks · Post by **BuzzMeeks** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 6:05 pm

Sorry brainyoga, I missed your earlier reply.

I just want to know if anybody out there who has used both can tell me pros and cons for OneTick vs kdb as I am faced with a requirement for "last tick" historical data whereas "yesterday's" data has always been sufficient in the past our strategies.

An ex colleague of mine uses OneTick and he has been evangilising about it as being the best thing since Nandos, but I would like a neutral view if possible. I am probably going to rule out Vahyu and Vertica as solutions after some initial digging around but will probably start looking seriously at kdb and onetick some time after the summer.

d4vid, thanks for your response, you have told me something I knew already about OneTick ${L_SMILIES_SMILE}$ I agree its a big plus though as the Q language is not the most intuitive or career friendly.

I'd be more interested in peoples views on functionality, performance and architecture (kdb vs onetick).

brainyoga · Post by **brainyoga** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 11:26 pm

I don't follow the standard language API argument as kdb+ has always had a c, java, c# api and they are very simple as they are just (de)serialization routines. Q is more intuitive to those who have studied functional/vector/set languages such as sql, lisp/scheme, haskell and matlab than more mainstream languages such as c, c# or java. Career friendly - my experience of learning Q was that it made me a better programmer; I've not heard of it hurting anyone's career.

I can speak about kdb+ functionality, performance and architecture.

Functionality - it is a virtual machine (byte code interpreter with super instructions), with built-in data types for vectors, dictionaries (hashtables) and tables. It has a bunch of built-in functions for some very powerful joins, and Q can sometimes look a bit like sql - e.g.

select size wavg price by sym from trade where date=2009.06.30, sym in `MSFT`CSCO, time within 10:00 11:00

There are feedhandlers out of the box but the c api is so simple it is quite straightforward to develop your own. And it hooks in to the common tools like excel and matlab.

Performance - Arthur Whitney has been optimizing the algorithms used in kdb+ for the last 30 years (Morgan Stanley and UBS had him for a few years to work on their trading systems). The executable is a couple of hundred kB, and is blazingly fast.

Architecture - It's a 64bit app and can be run in multithreaded, multiprocess and in a distributed mode on windows, solaris, linux and osx. It scales extremely well, although designs tend to revolve around concepts of in-memory database, on-disk database and gateways.

Last year there was a lot of talk about disk compression in the kdb+ community, but Kx chose to leave compression up to the file system software (e.g. ZFS gives a default compression ratio of about 3.3 for TAQ data) rather than implement a proprietary version themselves. Apparently another vendor had chosen to implement their own proprietary compression algorithm and was found to have slowly corrupted data, discovered some time after deployment.

There's a google group http://groups.google.com/group/personal-kdbplus and you can get a non-commercial version of kdb+ from kx.com. Kx has an internal group for commercial users.

krish · Post by **krish** » Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:11 pm

Have been using OneTick for over two years now, and i can tell you that its quite user friendly , there are tons of event Processors which you can use to do your routine tasks, and its really really fast ( comparable to that of KDB).

However you really cant program complex programs on One Tick unlike K+ ( probably less than 5% stuff) , thats probably only one drawback, however if you want really really complex programs even K+ cant handle that . In that case you probably have to Interface with Matlab or R.

All in all its beautiful to use , its killer fast, the error reporting is cool , you hardly ever face any problems once things are up and running.

ESMaestro · Post by **ESMaestro** » Tue Oct 11, 2011 10:51 pm

Anyone have ball-park cost estimate for a single-user license (non-enterprise)?

FDAXHunter · Post by **FDAXHunter** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 7:53 am

I'm not sure they do "single users". Reason is that an installation always encompasses several components: A database server, a CEP server, dev server(s) and clients. Even for a single-user case, it's a decent installation.

We received an indicative quote two years ago that ranged from 80,000 USD to 300,000 USD/year (depending on options suchs as number of feed handlers/number of cores/servers/etc). All of these providers (OneTick, StreamBase, Vertica, kx, Apama, etc.) tend to cluster around the starting price point of around 100,000 USD-200,000 USD, give or take 50,000 USD again depending on options). A global installation for an investment bank, however, can easily cross a few million USD.

Of course, your mileage may vary and products like this tend to be subject to very negotiable fees (and how much money you have. If you are a tier 1 investment bank, your quote will likely be a factor of 5-10 higher than that of a Namibian grain trader, at least that's how software license agreements of this sort tend to be handled in the industry. Deviations "from list price" tend to be massive). I obviously only have one quote to compare with.

I haven't looked at it since, but I wasn't very happy with it (features & functionality wise). I'm pretty bearish on all these "financial database" providers in general.

I can give you more color if you want to e-mail.

signalseeker · Post by **signalseeker** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 10:03 am

> krish: however if you want really really complex programs even K+ cant handle that . In that case you probably have to Interface with Matlab or R.

I am sorry but you have no idea what you are taking about.

FDAXHunter · Post by **FDAXHunter** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 11:48 am

Well, the fact that he's calling it "K+" (probably referring to "kdb+") is somewhat indicative of his familiarity with it Smiley .