Simon Garland chuckled as he examined charts showing the spikes in quote volumes on the New York Stock Exchange that began in August. "It was like Christmas," said the CTO of Kx Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of high-performance, in-memory database technology and streaming event processing. "It was magic."
But not for everyone. Garland says some firms lost ticks because their systems couldn't handle all the data coming from the exchanges. Systems didn't crash, but at the end of a day with 475 million quotes, 470 million might be in the database. "That's okay for a historical database," he notes, "but if you want to trade through the storm, the last thing you want is to lose ticks just when it is getting interesting."
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