At AquaQ we weren’t going to let lockdown number (I’ve lost count) stop us from celebrating Chinese New Year. This year is the ‘Year of the Ox’, said to bring stability, calmness, and great opportunities… I think we could all use a bit of that positivity! We’re counting on you, Ox. As we couldn’t celebrate Chinese New Year in person, …
A C++ Utopia – Some comments on interfacing kdb+ and C++
Recently quite a few projects at AquaQ have involved the manipulation of large numeric vectors in kdb+, and passing this data to and from external applications or tools written in C or C++. A practical example would relate to the use of machine learning libraries written in C++ that require output to be written to a kdb+ tickerplant or database. …
AquaQ Parquet kdb+ converter
Following on from the columnar and data formats blog post, we have decided to investigate creating a custom API for parquet. Traditionally, we would do this through python, however, we are interested to see what the performance benefits are. Kdb-Parquet is a library that can convert kdb+ tables to and from the Apache Parquet table format. The library provides a …
Real-time airline traffic dashboards with TorQ-Air
TorQ-Air is an application built on the TorQ framework that allows us to capture data through the Lufthansa developer API and perform both real-time and historical analytics on flight data. The solution includes a front-end built on Kx-dashboards, showing a number of real-time and historical stats. Download and installation instructions can be found on the TorQ-Air github repo. Founded in …
TorQ in 2020
2020 was a strange year for most of us. We’ve used it as an excuse to put a lot of work into extending TorQ- here’s a brief recap of some highlights. The first large contribution in 2020 was to provide the option of integrating Datadog into TorQ. Datadog is an extremely useful application monitoring service capable of tracking anything from …
AquaQ Food Challenge!
Here at AquaQ we’ve been coming up with ways to keep everyone engaged over lockdown, and what better way to do so than through the power of food! The first week was Italian week, so we sent out some ‘Dough it Yourself’ kits provided by Love Pizza Belfast, and challenged our team to make their best pizza. Our second week …
TorQ Segmented Tickerplant
Our most recent project here at AquaQ Analytics has been an extension of the TorQ production framework. In particular, a new segmented tickerplant process (STP) has been incorporated into TorQ which will provide greater flexibility to the user whilst also preserving the functionality of the original tickerplant process. This blog post will revisit the role of the tickerplant in TorQ, show the new features that a segmented tickerplant provides and highlight the advantages …
New York to Hong Kong Challenge…COMPLETED!
WE DID IT!! Our challenge to cover the 8061 miles between New York and Hong Kong was a tough one…but we achieved it in style! It was quite satisfying to total up the numbers and see that we actually walked, ran and cycled 9001.93 miles as a company. But who’s counting…? Our legs are sore, our feet are weary, and …
Halloween 2020!
We weren’t going to let a global pandemic stop us from dressing up for Halloween. We had everything from Spiderman, a horse, a phishing email, Crewmates (or Imposters?), Hermione Grainger…and a couple of clowns dressed as clowns! It certainly brightened our Stand Up on Friday 30th October. Thanks to everyone who took part, and well done to the lucky folks …
Comparing columnar data formats: Arrow, Vaex and kdb+
Here at AquaQ we have years of experience using kdb+ in the financial sector, helping our clients capture, analyse and derive value from their data. We always take a keen interest in technologies that will help us solve new problems, or provide better solutions for existing problems. To this end Apache Arrow is very interesting. Arrow describes itself as a …