Sybase calls its RAP – The Trading Edition product an analytics platform, but talking with a couple of executives and looking at the documentation has left me with the impression that this is more of a data management platform, an extension to the column-based database Sybase offers. (A column-based database is a database management system that stores content by column rather than by row. It only stores new portions of trade information, such as price, minute and second, thereby reducing storage space and retrieval time.) Complex event processing toolkits, such as those from Aleri, Streambase and Coral8, can then be used to develop analytics tools that work with the data. It seems to me that Sybase is competing with companies like Kx, Logical Information Machines and Vhayu that provide fast databases specifically designed for historical and real-time trade data that support market data analytics. (And although I haven’t spoken to IBM lately, I sense they are building a product to meet this need as well.)

RAP uses the FAST compression algorithm to compress stored data by up to 70%, which again, should reduce overall database size and improve data retrieval times.

Six capital markets firms, including Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International, have already begun using RAP – The Trading Edition. “As an early adopter of RAP – The Trading Edition, our trading desk has been able to be more responsive to market opportunities through faster, more complete analysis of market data, both historical and real-time feeds,” said Jason Ross, director, Rates Trading Group at MUSI. “We were pleasantly surprised at the performance speed, and found we need only half the storage capacity to store the same amount of data.”