eXtremeDB Financial Edition DBMS Powers Innovation in TradeStation’s Next-Gen Order Execution System 

With rollout approaching for its order execution system incorporating the eXtremeDB® Financial Edition database management system (DBMS), TradeStation is finding that the specialized DBMS for financial systems from McObject® delivers the expected performance boost – and that eliminating data management latency makes room for new features and flexibility that benefit its trading customers.

Integrating eXtremeDB Financial Edition with the new order execution system has “reduced database transaction times by more than an order of magnitude as compared with traditional database systems,” said Joe Pautler, TradeStation Development Manager. As a result, trades complete faster – a major advantage, considering the importance of trade execution speed to TradeStation’s market of technology-savvy, active traders.

Just as importantly, the elimination of latency in database processing has provided the performance headroom for adding new features to the order execution system, including the ability to use more complex order types and trading algorithms. This will enable users to pursue strategies that are more tailored to their specific market opportunities, Pautler said.

TradeStation’s order-execution system processes trades from the moment orders are placed until they are filled and recorded. Database processing must be extremely fast to avoid introducing latency. Between order placement and execution, the order-execution system accesses its database many times to accomplish time-critical tasks ranging from checking customer funds and margin limits to risk management, order routing and comparing bids and offers on different trading venues.

TradeStation presents order-execution speed as a key differentiator of its services, noting on its website the “price improvement opportunities” made possible by trade processing that is many times faster than the industry average.

“In capital markets computing, eliminating data management latency and adding innovative features for trading are often two sides of the same coin: the CPU cycles saved via more efficient data sorting and analysis can be redeployed to further the core system goal of more profitable trading, while staying within the very short permitted time window. McObject is pleased that TradeStation is realizing this benefit from its use of eXtremeDB Financial Edition,” said Chris Mureen, McObject’s chief operating officer.

eXtremeDB Financial Edition provides features to optimize capital markets systems for speed, fault-tolerance and scalability. These features include:

• A core in-memory and on-disk database system that delivers database responsiveness measured in microseconds
• Support for column-based as well as traditional row-based data layout (including hybrid designs)
• A rich library of vector-based statistical functions to analyze time-series data. These functions can be pipelined in order to keep relevant market data in CPU cache and avoid latency-inducing handoffs between CPU cache and main memory
• An ultra-short execution path (code size is under 500K) that minimizes demand for CPU cycles and maximizes CPU cache efficiency
• Reliability/recoverability via ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable) database transactions and transaction logging
• Distributed database scalability, performance and fault-tolerance, through distributed query processing, clustering and high availability sub-systems
• Multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) including standard SQL and a type-safe native C/C++ API. Java, C# and Python interfaces are also provided

Source: McObject – eXtremeDB Financial Edition DBMS Powers Innovation in TradeStation’s Next-Gen Order Execution System

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