SQL Databases - You Know Where The Door Is?

I've joined the team decisions, but when I read Michael's post on HDF5 yesterday, it made me brooding again. A correct and in time decision made with a careful view into the most probable future of data management. But what about the regulatory wishes and ability of technology providers?

No data silos banks!

The regulatory bodies do not like fluid data - they want them solid…they want evidence of every transaction. And we created the UnRisk FACTORY data base that stores every information of every detail of each valuation transaction forever. Every! And clearly, they are strictly SQL compliant and far beyond we provide functions in our UnRisk Financial Language (UnRisk-Q) that enable to manipulate its objects and data programmatically.

The UnRisk engines are blazingly fast and, obviously, database management became a nasty bottleneck.

The data space "explodes" with the valuation space

xVA - and the related regime of centralization - introduces immense complexity to the valuation space.

In xVA - fairer pricing or accounting VOODOO  I wrote sixteen months ago

….selecting momentary technologies blindly may make it impossible to achieve the ambitious goals. Data and valuation management needs to be integrated carefully and an exposure modeling engine needs to work event driven.With this respect we are in the middle of the VA project. Manage the valuation side first - and do it the UnRisk way: build a sound fundament for a really tall bullding

And this is what we did.

The new regime needs trust

Of course, we'll make inputs, results and important (meta)information available. But, what was still possible with our VaR Universe...store every detail...like VaR deltas…in SQL retrievable form...may be impossible under the new regime.

But, UnRisk Financial Language users will have the required access and much more…functions to aggregate and evaluate risk, margin...data and what have you.

So, ironically regulatory bodies may have boycotted a part of their transparency requests?

However, IMO, it needs more trust of all parties from the beginning…and the view behind the curtain will become even more important. You can't keep millions of valuations to get a single price…evident? But we can explain what we do and how our interim data are calculated.

With out pioneer clients we go already through the programs…and courses and workouts will become part of our know-how packages.

The options of future data management?

The world of data management is changing. Analytical data platforms, NoSQL databases…are hot topics. But, what I see in the core: new computing muscles do not only crunch numbers lightning fast, they will come with very large RAM memory.

This affects software architectures, functionality and scalability. Those RAM memories may become bases for NoSQL databases…however, ending up with disk-less databases.

There may be many avenues to pursue…but it's no mistake to think of a NoSQL world.

It's unprecedented fast again

Many years ago we've turned UnRisk into gridUnRisk performing single valuations on computational kernels in parallel. Then we started making things inherently parallel. Now we accelerate the data management immensely.

Prepared for any future. Luckily we've chosen the right architectures and technologies from the beginning.