Choosing a time series database

[goodboy]

Did some decent starter research on what systems will work for production grade data feed collaboration.

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I'm going to list some top picks and what I deem to be pros/cons; comes with a check-mark if we have an existing integration.

• alpaca's marketstore
  • built for use with numpy
  • it seems simple, with a reasonably manageable code base in golang; hackable and with an interesting design
  • recently got grpc support
  • plugin system which seems to a a few decent things you might not find in your average TSDB:
    • a websocket streaming interace on updates
    • an on disk aggregator
  • no clustering, failover, sharding

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on the suit fronts

• databento: a new psuedo-FOSS based legacy market provider #495

  • general roadmap dash: https://roadmap.databento.com/roadmap
  • docs: https://docs.databento.com/
    • symbology API (FQME: fully qualified market endpoint, (or f#$% me) the thing no suit could imagine.. #467!): https://docs.databento.com/api-reference-historical/symbology
      • for futes: https://roadmap.databento.com/b/n0o5prm6/feature-ideas/smart-symbology-lead-month-contracts
      • WIP for opts: https://roadmap.databento.com/b/n0o5prm6/feature-ideas/smart-symbology-for-options
      • treasuries data: https://roadmap.databento.com/b/n0o5prm6/feature-ideas/cash-treasuries-data
    • live API clients and avail src codez: https://github.com/databento/
      • python client: https://github.com/databento/databento-python
        • docs: https://docs.databento.com/getting-started?historical=python&live=python
        • api docs: https://docs.databento.com/api-reference-live
      • rust backend lib: https://github.com/databento/dbn
        • already opened an issue asking about running you're own: Is there a self-hosted tsdb (dbz?) and any existing docker container? databento/databento-python#9

• the new arcticdb, a replacement for the prior arctic project (see below)

  • repo: https://github.com/man-group/ArcticDB
  • Feb 2023 update about the release of the C++ rewrite in collab
    with bloomy: https://www.man.com/man-group-brings-powerful-dataframe-database-product-arcticdb-to-market-with-bloomberg
  • need to figure out if we can store np.ndarrays as well or
    potentially write a polars adapter?

• the original arctic by the "man group" which allows serializing dfs and np arrays.

  • seems to have competed more directly with marketstore but is built on mongodb
  • has a tick storage format using pd.DataFrame: https://arctic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tickstore/
    • talk on storing 10^12 rows of timeseries: https://vimeo.com/showcase/3660528/video/145842301
  • cryptofeed backend impl: https://github.com/bmoscon/cryptofeed/blob/6cf185de641cd63b180f2a34cf52c0773e5961a3/cryptofeed/backends/arctic.py

• QuestDb which seems to claim QuestDB is the fastest open source time series database

  • but it's java...
  • repo: https://github.com/questdb/questdb
  • cryptofeed backend impl: https://github.com/bmoscon/cryptofeed/blob/6cf185de641cd63b180f2a34cf52c0773e5961a3/cryptofeed/backends/quest.py

• greptimedb: https://github.com/GreptimeTeam/greptimedb

  An open-source, cloud-native, distributed time-series database with PromQL/SQL/Python supported.

  • written in rust

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legacy-ish FOSS projects that probably aren't specialized enough..

• influxdb is the gold standard in TSDBs

  • here's a quant related SO question that resulted in this pump
  • the github repo
  • cryptofeed backend impl: https://github.com/bmoscon/cryptofeed/blob/6cf185de641cd63b180f2a34cf52c0773e5961a3/cryptofeed/backends/influxdb.py

• timescaledb is an extension on top of postgres

  • here's a 18' pump on pushing 3B points a day and how it outperforms influxdb
  • another pump blog post on ingesting from kafka
  • has all the benefits of postgres
  • afaik can work with apache arrow and turbodbc

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Additional Resources

• blog post on connecting apache arrow to the SQL world
• a post from uber on moving from postgres to mysql
• cryptofeed's long list of backends which includes some serious projects i hadn't seen before.

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Thots

• One of the things I want to keep in mind is supporting apache arrow formatted data for streaming.
  The arrow project's new flight system seems to be the way things are going.

[goodboy]

Probably worth reading up on some professional grade systems:

• kdb+
  • which is a column oriented db
  • there's a free version which requires being on-line

[goodboy]

Did a little more research on timescaledb and found this reddit thread which criticized its performance 😿

On the brighter side, Ameobea suggested the very cool looking tectonicdb for L2 tick data:

• example python client
• the socket spec
• L2 book plotting code discussed in detail in this blog post.
• oh, and it's got an offline parser which can be used to read dataframes, yeye!

[goodboy]

Noticing a category of "IoT" capture dbs:

• griddb our of japan

[goodboy]

https://github.com/singularity-data/risingwave