Lately, I have been talking with IT directors at various financial firms. There seems to be one consistent message --- The holy grail that all of the financial firms are seeking is the universal database, where all trades across all asset classes can be held.
This is especially problematic at financial firms who keep buying other firms (Wachovia, Bank of America).
OLAP is a hot skill right now, and companies what to perform sophisticated queries over huge amounts of data. Finetix currently is working in the OLAP space int he commodities area of a major financial firm. This firm has asked Finetix to invent a cloning machine so we duplicate our 3 OLAP stars and sprinkle them throughout the firm. Maybe I should start attending Andrew Brust's presentations at the various .NET user groups.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
1 comment:
Before you get the universal DB, you of course need the universal data model. Regarding your olap comments,are they independent of the Universal Database ( nothing to do with UDB the product of course ) ? ie some star schema should be the basis of the transaction data warehouse ? I think the instrument classification hierarchy can be implemented in a reasonably straightforward fashion and building a transaction database has been done before. There are issues around how useful these things could be in terms of determining your positions etc in a timely manner, who feeds this monolith and how often ? I entirely agree that many IT directors seem to want this, the issue is what do they want it for ?
and is it realistic ? Is it still in the 'architecture group' space in their ivory towers ? Would you use it to support your various risk management databases, as well as reconciliations ( internal and external ) ? Ive been working in this space for a while and in fact exchanged a few emails with Matt a few months ago on this subject. Im interested in your thoughts. We havent even touched on the metadata yet !!
Alasdair
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