11B Technologies (11B.io) is a technology and service provider for foreign exchange spot transaction (FX SPOT) and other over-the-counter (OTC) brokers and professionals. They offer brokerage solutions and integrations to customers all over the world.

The team at 11B Technologies were in search of a database while working on a project that required them to watch data and study how trades flow in order to properly categorize information in the appropriate risk management channels. They needed a database to archive the 5GB of FX SPOT market data they had coming in daily, as well as a database that empowered them to access every bit of information in an instant.

11B Technologies chose InfluxDB as their time series database versus using Kx kdb+, which would have cost them at least six figures. InfluxDB has given the team at 11B Technologies the power to carry out their project and more. With InfluxDB, they are able to restore 10-tier quotes (the last price a security traded at) from an order book at any microsecond, in no time at all. They can run attrition rates for trades in real-time and take advantage InfluxQL aggregations and selectors such as “LAST(),” which returns the newest field value (determined by timestamp) associated with each field key in the measurement. Additionally, they have taken advantage of the ability to write and store data via batches – which makes writes using the InfluxDB API much more performant by drastically reducing the HTTP overhead.

Further, with InfluxDB, 11B Technologies is able to tell what is happening in microseconds, run a query in less than 5 milliseconds and quickly write simple Python scripts to extend capabilities. With InfluxDB, 11B Technologies is empowered and able to achieve almost real time data collection and visualization – they’ve gone from taking 2 hrs to run a report, to reports being ready in only 1 millisecond.

They enjoy much of what InfluxData offers, which includes using Chronograf, and have even offered it to traders so that they can use it in their research. They have also used Telegraf to watch server resources – they loved how simple it and InfluxDB were to install!