ANTs software, inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: ANTS), a leader in high-performance SQL database management systems, today announced that it will be demonstrating its powerful ANTs(R) Data Server (ADS) for attendees at the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference, June 8-10, 2004 in New York.
The ANTs Data Server can enable securities firms, mutual fund managers, investment banking houses, and other financial services providers to meet rigorous new SEC audit and financial controls regulations while achieving higher transaction throughput. Unlike traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs) that generally require expensive hardware and complicated application development to achieve high throughput for update-intensive applications, the ANTs Data Server uses patent-pending software technology to provide high throughput on low-cost, industry-standard hardware.
"Today's financial instruments have become incredibly complex, demanding powerful analytical capabilities for sophisticated pricing, arbitrage, fraud detection and trade validation," said Cliff Hersh, chief scientist at ANTs. "Traditional database architectures often require extensive development and expensive hardware to handle the unprecedented processing demand and volume. The ANTs Data Server was designed expressly to deliver high performance for high-volume, update-intensive applications."
Performance Must Increase Exponentially
As retail customers increasingly use the Web to conduct pricing research and place trades, the supporting database systems must process thousands of look-ups that do not result in revenue-generating transactions. Web-based, customer-facing applications must be able to deal with unpredictable demand peaks, which can create significant data contention problems in the database. Slow applications and long wait times drive online customers away. The ANTs Data Server delivers performance improvements of 16-124 times the throughput offered by conventional database systems for update-intensive applications. Automatic failover and replication features further assure maximum application availability.
High-powered Processing Key to New Regulatory Compliance
As regulatory agencies enforce new standards of ethics, disclosure and financial controls, financial technology systems may need to be extended for detection, compliance and audit capabilities. Many financial institutions process intensive analytics on-the-fly to maintain market positions, protect hedge strategies, detect fraud, authorize trades and assure trade validity. Firms are frequently faced with the costly alternatives of adding hardware, software and support personnel to current systems, or writing proprietary new applications to handle the additional processing.
The alternative is using an RDBMS that breaks the performance barriers. Using familiar RDBMS SQL APIs, stored procedures, triggers and other advanced features, the ANTs Data Server is able to handle heavy workloads without artificial complexity for developers or database administrators. Using standard symmetric multi-processing hardware with the operating systems already popular on Wall Street, ADS can handle production workloads of an entire database, or act as a pre-processor to front-end "hot tables" held within traditional RDBMSs.