Actian/Ingres Case study.

1. SUCCESS STORY
VectorWise at Rohatyn Group
The Rohatyn Group (TRG) is a hedge fund headquartered in New York focusing
on emerging markets.
THE CHALLENGE
Information about positions, pricing and risk is critical to investment decision making. For
tactical decision making TRG provided analysts immediate access to the information they need in
Customer a format that they can use through a self-service data access environment. TRG maintain extensive
Rohatyn Group data about the current state of all their market positions in a multi-dimensional data structure
managed by a proprietary in-memory database. This enabled analysts to interactively answer their
Industry questions about the current state of their investments.
Financial Services
The combination of market volatility and a desire to do more strategic analysis drove the need
Challenge to understand how the positions had performed over time. While the existing solution provided
• Risk management the interactive analysis TRG were looking for, it did not have the historical data. They wanted the
required in the highly user tools to remain the same and the query responses to be interactive, but they needed to do the
volatile market of
analysis on more than 1000 times the data.
hedge funds.
Solution ALTERNATIVES
VectorWise was deployed to
The proprietary in-memory database clearly would not be able to hold the volume of data required
process data from multiple
to analyze market positions over time, so TRG started to look for alternatives.
systems so that hedge fund
managers could evaluate their Existing relational database technology was ruled out because solutions could not provide the
positions in near real time. interactivity the analysts wanted without spending a fortune on hardware, database tuning, or both.
Benefits A third option TRG evaluated was the use of a specialized OLAP engine. While the engine would
Ability to mitigate financial risk probably be able to provide the interactivity the analysts wanted, the implementation would
require specialized OLAP skills and the existing ad hoc data access tools would not be able to
interact directly with the OLAP environment.
SOLUTION
TRG learned about VectorWise during its Technology Preview Program in the Spring of
2010. Warren Master, CTO of TRG, read about the underlying technology and decided to give
VectorWise a try. The result: incredibly fast performance out of the box. Warren’s first experience
made him decide to run a full proof of concept on a low-cost server: a $999 server with only 2
CPU cores and 2 GB of memory!
For the VectorWise POC TRG could have mapped the existing data structures to a star schema
with 20 dimensional tables and a fact table. Instead TRG decided to flatten all of the data into
a single table with almost 300 columns. They loaded millions of rows of historical data into

2. SUCCESS STORY
the single table and the results were incredible: VectorWise provided the in-memory performance and interactivity the
analysts wanted with the data residing on-disk. Fast performance was delivered out-of-the-box without any indexing, pre-
aggregating results, or extensive database tuning. VectorWise’s support for standard SQL made the implementation very
fast and the simplicity of the data design made the migration very easy.
A solution very similar to what was tested in the POC has been in production at TRG since September 2010. For
production use the $999 server has been upgraded to a modest enterprise class server. The use of any other relational
database technology would have required TRG to implement a multi-node cluster in order to achieve the performance and
interactivity the users want.
BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL BENEFITS
VectorWise provided exactly what TRG was looking for and more:
• Access to historical data enables different analyses that enable analysts to better assess the risk of the current market
positions. This results in a higher confidence about current positions and a better ability to make decisions about position
changes.
• Flexibility and adaptability of the VectorWise-based solution have improved greatly over the proprietary in-memory
database. When the analysts decide that they need to track several additional stress tests for all of their positions, there is
no need for a new data design or reprogramming. In VectorWise extra columns in the table are populated with data and
the users can immediately perform their analyses with no further changes to the application.
• In-memory query performance against large data sets that cannot possibly fit in-memory is delivering the performance
and interactivity the users want. Not having to index or aggregate the data prior to publication means that users can
quickly gain access to the data and don’t have to wait for time-consuming load processes to finish.
• ANSI SQL-based interfaces and standards-based connectivity enabled the existing tools to work against VectorWise
without modification.
• Relational database management is well-known at TRG’s IT department so the company did not have to acquire expert
skills to manage or tune the database.
FUTURE
TRG implemented VectorWise underneath an application that had the biggest need for improvement. There are other areas
where TRG see opportunities to benefit from the out-of-the-box performance VectorWise can provide.
About Ingres Corporation
Ingres is the leading open source database management company. We are the world’s second largest open source company and the pioneer of The New
Economics of IT, providing open source solutions at dramatically reduced cost than proprietary software vendors. As a leader in The New Economics of IT,
Ingres delivers low cost and accelerated innovation to its more than 10,000 customers worldwide.
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