finEye chooses IBM DB2 9 with pureXML for financial analytic decision support system

Overview

finEye Corporation
Sunnyvale, CA
www.fineye.com

Industry
• Technology
IBM Products
• IBM DB2® 9 with pureXML™
For more information www.ibm.com/db2

“No matter what the size of the database, the performance of DB2 9 has been consistent and has not broken down even once. Thanks to IBM for providing a good product which has helped increase the performance of our complex XQueries, which did not yield comparable results when executed on other XML databases.”
— Dr. Tejaswi Sundarram, Program Director and Analytic Systems Chief Architect, finEye

With operations in Silicon Valley, New York City and Bangalore, India, finEye is an analytic software company that provides an integrated suite of software applications to help investment professionals evaluate the performance of a company. finEye Insight, the company’s Web-based flagship product, applies sophisticated technology to synthesize and analyze vast amounts of publicly available financial information. It collects and transforms data, applies rigorous mathematical models such as Computational Intelligence techniques to rank and weight qualitative and quantitative factors, and identifies early warnings and positive insights.

Challenge
finEye Insight collects and analyzes information from a wide range of data sources, including U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, press releases, performance reports, and published reports on earnings, profits, cash flows, assets, liabilities and competitive positioning of publicly traded companies for the last several years.

This data is typically represented in XML format which contains varying, highly nested and complex structures from diverse sources of both manual and automated processes. Furthermore, finEye’s database environment is quite large. It covers thousands of companies, and the data volume is increasing by hundreds of gigabytes per year. The ongoing changes in accounting standards, the increasing volume of information within each disclosure, and the number of companies to be covered make it even more difficult to store, manage and analyze this information.

finEye explored the existing database management technologies to look for an inexpensive, robust and scalable database system with efficient support for both relational and XML data. The company needed a system that could quickly retrieve XML data using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) industry standard query language (XQuery), which it believed would provide the capabilities necessary to support its in-depth equity research and financial analysis requirements.

Solution
finEye chose IBM DB2 9 pureXML to create a flexible, extensible and scalable information platform for its equity research decision support system. The hybrid database technology of DB2 combines the flexibility of the XML model with the performance of the relational model, and seamlessly supports analytic applications based on SQL and XQuery. With DB2 pureXML, XML data can be stored in its native hierarchical format simply by defining a column of type “XML” and queried directly through XQuery or SQL/XML. With heavy and complex usage of XQuery, finEye Insight is now able to perform more in-depth analysis of a company’s information and current equity market standings, which provides better tools for decision making.

With its selective value indexing over XML data, DB2 pureXML enables finEye to define XML indexes on the XML data used for analyzing so that it can be used along with relational indexes by the new, sophisticated DB2 optimizer for optimal query performance. Consequently, Insight’s analysis engine is now able to efficiently handle and analyze more information than ever before.

“No matter what the size of the database, the performance of DB2 9 has been consistent and has not broken down even once,” said Tejaswi Sundarram, program director and chief architect of finEye’s analytic system. “Thanks to IBM for providing a good product which has helped increase the performance of our complex XQueries, which did not yield comparable results when executed on other XML databases.”

Benefits
• Greater and faster business insight and investment decision making for customers
• Robust and scalable platform
• Reduced cost and labor for implementing analytic applications
• Low price with IBM DB2 Express-C license and subscription option