TrustRadius Insights
Users of KX software have found it invaluable for analyzing fast-moving data with historical context, enabling faster decision-making and …
Overview
What is kdb+?
kdb+ is a time series database from kx headquartered in Palo Alto, California, a division of First Derivatives.
Recent Reviews
Product Demos
Racing Drone Rolling Launch Control || IPC Implementation Demo (q/kdb+ EmbedPy and ML Toolkit demo)
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kdb+ trader dashboards demo
YouTube
Nataraj Dasgupta: Patient ML app demo using Python, R & kdb+
YouTube
Kevin Holsgrove: Query Routing Demo
YouTube
Glenn Wright & Rebecca Kelly: Kx in the Public Cloud (AWS demo at 6 minutes, 25 seconds)
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Fintan Quill: Intro to kdb+ and demo
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Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
What is kdb+?
kdb+ Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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Reviews and Ratings
(7)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Users of KX software have found it invaluable for analyzing fast-moving data with historical context, enabling faster decision-making and providing greater insight for business processes. This has been particularly useful for post and pre-trade analysis, allowing users to work with large datasets from the US Equity Options market data feeds. The software has also been crucial for processing massive amounts of real-time data and deriving real-time insights in the fields of equity and FX.
The ability to analyze vast volumes of data in real-time as well as historically has aided in a wide range of applications, including electronic trading, market making, client profitability analysis, trading analytics, TIC data analytics, and market abuse surveillance. KX software has been relied upon for its timeseries data handling capabilities, as well as its data quality, cleansing, and enrichment features. It provides high speed and scale for loading and enrichment workloads.
In addition to these use cases, KX has been used to observe real-time trends in client-facing businesses and has proven invaluable for debugging large datasets. It has addressed challenges related to time series data storage, management, and analysis. The platform has also been utilized for building multi-asset trading analytics platforms and for financial data reporting and analytics. Furthermore, KX has facilitated the quick building and running of large simulations.
Comprehensive Analytics Solution: Users find KX's streaming analytics, data and analytics capabilities in a single solution to be unique and comprehensive. This has been mentioned by several reviewers who appreciate the convenience of having all their analytical needs met in one platform. Ease of Use: The solution is praised for its ease of use, with users stating that analysis is simple, fast, and easy to share. Many reviewers have found the platform user-friendly and intuitive, allowing them to quickly perform complex operations without much effort. Efficient Handling of Time Series Data: Users appreciate KX's ability to handle intricate time series transformations on large amounts of data efficiently. Several reviewers have specifically highlighted this feature as a strong point of the platform, enabling them to work with time series data effectively. Overall, reviewers have consistently praised KX for its comprehensive analytics capabilities, ease of use, and efficient handling of time series data.
Lack of Simple Features: Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of simple features related to IPC, which they feel hinders their experience with the product. They believe that the product could benefit from additional features and functionalities in this area.
Learning Curve of q language: The learning curve of the programming language q has been mentioned as a potential downside by several reviewers. They feel that it can be challenging to grasp initially, although some users believe this concern is overstated and can be overcome with practice and available resources.
Limited Standard Tooling: Users have mentioned that the limited standard tooling provided by the product has led them to build more than necessary, which could have been done more efficiently with other systems. This limitation has caused frustration among some users who would prefer a wider range of pre-built tools and functionalities.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 29, 2022
Scalable and Reliable
We use it for large-scale data collection, storage, analysis, and modeling. It has been game-changing in our ability to conduct research on large-scale datasets and has sped up our research pipeline and ability to share code across the team. This is for basic queries as well as more sophisticated AI work.
- Time series analysis.
- Large dataset storage.
- Query re-use.
- Run time error message readability, particularly for new users.
- Backwards compatibility between versions.
- Reliability.
- Scalability.
- Re-use.
- Ability to get insights into a large production system.
- Ability to handle data volumes greater than more basic databases / query languages.
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and MATLAB
Cheaper, more commonly used in industry. Simpler to start using, complications of the language aside.
July 29, 2016
Fast but hard to implement
We use kdb to store and analyze real time market data for transaction cost analysis.
- Process large amounts of time series data
- Perform quick calculations without use of cursor
- Use of window joins and as of joins
- Hard to read
- Hard to find knowledgeable developers
- Lack of good IDE
- Long development time
- Long hiring cycle
- Hard to error check
It is much faster and more flexible than traditional SQL databases.
8
trading cost analysis
database programming, scripting programming
- time series data analysis
- live tick trading
- trading analysis
- none
- trade execution
No
- Product Reputation
Looked at the availble talent pool
- Don't know
No
No
We have not had a very positive experience with the solutions KX has provided to our issues.
- time series calcutions
- easily access and manipulate records without a cursor
- ability to create functions withing a given query
- indexing multiple columns
- readability of the language
- debugging
No
January 08, 2016
KDB+ for real time tick data and analytics
I work in the equities area, where we use kdb for most of our real time tick data requirements. Tick data in our case ranges from market data, real time analytics, live PNL and orders data etc.
- It is really fast if chosen for the right problem.
- Large logic can be shrunk into a tiny snippet.
- It provides a column oriented database, where each column in a table is a vector. Thus you can perform very fast analytics using its vector processing power.
- It is sometimes painful to accept the fact that KDB+ is not fully multithreaded.
- The ability to write shorter code for a complex logic is really good. But it makes it really cryptic. Cryptic codes are very difficult to maintain and extend.
- For some small institutions license cost is little high.
- It perfectly solves most of our real time tick data needs.
- Finding good kdb resources is slightly difficult. Also new people trying to learn kdb experience a relatively longer learning curve.
- MemSQL and OneTick
January 05, 2016
kdb+ is always ahead of its time
I've been using kdb+ in the context of storing and generating analytic from large financial data set for over 10 years. IMHO, no other product provides the performance and flexibility remotely close to kdb+. The build-in language q is very terse and expressive. In one of my former jobs, traders were creating new quantitative models almost "in the speed of thoughts" with kdb+. That really gave us the edge of "time to market".
- Time series analysis. The built-in vector operations are extremely fast. Also with the q language you can code up any customized analytical ideas quickly.
- The database are all file based, very easy to maintain.
- Very solid and fast interface to websocket, so you can interface with javascript easily.
- The learning curve is a little steep in the beginning.
- Fast turn around on delivering new ideas and products.
vertica, oracle, streambase, Hadoop
December 14, 2015
Powerful language
kdb+ is very useful in the trading world as it allows analysts to look at huge amounts of data quickly and somewhat easily. Speed was a huge factor.
- Efficient computing.
- Code interpretation is fast.
- Designed with finance in mind.
- The language is difficult to learn.
- Better solutions are needed for breaking loops without resetting servers.
- Include basic templates for fields such as finance, medicine, etc.
- Increases the speed of the research process.
- Allows for quick analysis and results.
- Rapid implementation of new ideas.
Python is very commonly used for large data analysis and in general is much easier to pickup than kdb+. The biggest drawback of kdb+ is the learning curve.