The brainchild of a world-leading C++ programming expert, Quasar DB is a time series database allowing users to “store everything forever and query it at will”. Whilst championing speed and storage capacity, Quasar DB sees incoming regulation as a trigger for companies to review their database options and realise both compliancy and user benefits of their unique database solution. With the influx of masses of new financial information generated by crypto- assets and trading, the team are welcoming a new wave of fintech use cases.
Applauded by Cisco as being one of the first databases to saturate their networking capabilities, Quasar DB tackled database inefficiency by approaching the issue from a kernel programmer’s point of view rather than adding additional layers to existing solutions. We sat down with COO, Jean-Claude Taggert to discuss how Quasar DB is redefining database efficiency.
Tackling the tech
Underpinning the technical specifications and programming jargon is, in essence, a database designed to store limitless time series data for demanding use cases with the ability to query that data in real time. That in itself is a unique property, Jean-Claude explains: “Most competitors switch to a dual system database as soon as volume increases too much; one for storage and one for analysis.” Quasar DB, however, proudly houses both storage and analytical systems in one, which gives them the edge over competitors who have “Scaled their current systems as far as possible, and have reached the limits of what they can store and analyse across two systems in real time”.
As their database was designed “to handle the most extreme time series use cases in financial applications”, Quasar DB have produced a solution allowing for the back-testing of huge amounts of financial data instantaneously. Jean-Claude is proud to announce that at this point they are “well ahead of competition” and the only available database that can “store whatever you want, keep it forever, and query it in real time”.
Captain of the class
Originally designed for quantitative analysts “who are spending too much time extracting the right data to test algorithms”, Jean-Claude is able to joke that these analysts now have a ‘love-hate’ relationship with Quasar DB: “While they are now able to routinely process terabytes of data per day without fault and in real time, they no longer have time for a coffee or cigarette while waiting for their query results”.
Such a seamless combination of in-memory capabilities with unlimited storage has led the team beyond just financial services into more demanding fields such as defence systems, autonomous vehicles and space transportation. The solution boasts the ability to ingest billions of data points per second while keeping a very low disk and memory footprint, and makes them “the only database” currently able to store and query the amount of data that will be required by the emerging autonomous vehicle industry. Jean-Claude predicts that competitors starting today will take four years of development to catch them.
Bonus Benefits
In their ongoing quest to develop the fastest database with unlimited storage, Quasar DB have incidentally discovered a myriad of ancillary benefits.
As Quasar DB reliably records all time deviation on your network, it offers users the ability to instantly prove time compliance under recently imposed MiFID II regulations – and hence significantly reduce resources and time wasted on satisfying auditors. Jean-Claude predicts this will become an increasingly important feature as regulations become stricter, and has already seen an influx of users who re-evaluated their solution provider after compliancy concerns, to find “Quasar DB is the best” due to their speed and storage capabilities: “[they] can instantly prove time compliance”.
Much like its COO who switches between several languages at will, Quasar DB is a polyglot and can be powered directly from Excel, Spark, Python or SQL-like query language, freeing users to query through an interface they are familiar with. This is quickly compared to competitors who require the use of native languages that hold users captive to that database.
When probed about the pricing difference between Quasar DB and competitors, Jean-Claude smirked as he detailed: “We cost 10-20% of legacy solution providers in terms of licensing rights, and far less in terms of total cost of ownership.”
A future in fintech?
The team were extremely eager to usher in the fintech wave as new fintech start-ups emerged and are able to go from “zero to a ready-to-use research database in less than one hour”. It has also provided entirely new markets with masses of new data, which will all need to be queried by quantitative analysts, and the faster, the better. Jean-Claude mischievously hopes that companies “Start fresh with the right time series database, Quasar DB, instead of having to swap over later”.