NYSE accelerates BI with switch to data-warehousing

19.12.2008
NYSE Euronext Inc., the operator of the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext and several other stock exchanges, has adopted data warehousing appliances from and to accelerate its analysis of internal business and performance data.

NYSE Euronext has been using for the past nine months to store and analyze data to determine where there are slowdowns in the process of taking, executing and acknowledging trades for stocks, bonds and other securities, according to chief data officer Steve Hirsch.

The time for an order to arrive at the NYSE's network, be executed, and then have an acknowledgement, or 'ack,' sent back to the trading party, is already fast: 1 to 2 milliseconds, Hirsch said. But using Greenplum to analyze bottlenecks in this system will help the NYSE "get closer to zero," he said in an interview Thursday.

The Greenplum software includes both data warehousing and BI analytical capabilities. This allows the appliance, which includes a from and fiber-attached storage totaling 100 TB in capacity, to analyze the data itself, rather than sending large amounts of data to a separate server for analysis.

"This makes us hundreds to thousands of times faster. It's incredible," Hirsch said. He cited one task that formerly took 12 hours to run and now takes "just minutes," and another report that formerly took 50 to 60 hours to generate and now "runs in a single hour."

Accelerating trade times is an important but new emphasis for the tradition-bound, 216-year-old NYSE. It only two years ago while maintaining traditional human auctioneering.