What makes me buy into DolphinDB:
- Friendly DolphinDB – Cross-Exchange Arbitraging Case
- Speedy DolphinDB – Why is DolphinDB so fast?
- Robust DolphinDB – Reliable, Scalable, Resilient, Consistent, and Monitorable
- Cost Effective DolphinDB – Worth the Money
- DolphinDB – An Integrated Financial Data Platform, Not Just a Time-Series Database
This is the fourth post in my series where I share why I’m a strong proponent of DolphinDB. I’ve always felt that DolphinDB offers great value for the capabilities it provides, especially when compared to other alternatives currently available in the high-performance financial database space. In this post, I will break down the total cost of ownership (TCO) of DolphinDB into five categories and analyse its cost-effectiveness in each.
The TCO of DolphinDB is broken down into the following five categories:
- Licensing Fees
- Infrastructure & Hardware Costs
- Initial Setup Costs
- Ongoing Administration & Operation Costs
- Expertise and User Productivity Costs
The first four categories of costs are relatively fixed and predictable. With proper planning and the application of suitable resources, these costs are relatively easy to manage. In each of these four categories, I will analyse the DolphinDB features and advantages that can help reduce customers’ bills
The tricky one is the fifth category: Expertise and User Productivity Costs. These costs are unpredictable, difficult to measure, and often unnoticed. However, they are also often the most costly expenses. At the same time, this is an area where organisations can make significant cost savings when properly managed. Therefore, I will take a closer look at this category and analyse how DolphinDB can help.
1) Licensing Fees
Compared to its alternatives in the same space, by all the means, DolphinDB is not expensive. Not only for large organisations, DolphinDB is also affordable for small to mid-sized financial services companies. Of course, DolphinDB’s licensing fees are higher than those of open-source time-series databases. However, aside from licensing costs, adopting an open-source system is not as inexpensive as many might imagine. The costs associated with acquiring the necessary expertise and making ongoing investments in maintenance can quickly outweigh the savings from using an open-source system.
In addition, DolphinDB is not just a time-series database; it is a high-performance financial data platform with built-in support for a wide range of financial use cases. To my knowledge, there are no open-source alternatives that offer capabilities comparable to DolphinDB’s level.
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2) Infrastructure & Hardware Costs
Aiming to squeeze out as much performance as possible from given resources, DolphinDB has integrated many optimisation technologies and designs to maximize resource usage. This results in overall cost savings by needing less hardware to achieve the same (or better) results. Taking the customer story of Taiwan Yongfeng Securities as an example, after moving to DolphinDB, they reduced the number of servers from 6 to 2 (one of which is for DR), while achieving better performance.
In addition, DolphinDB supports elastic scaling, which enables companies to scale based on demand, rather than over-provisioning hardware upfront. As a result, businesses can avoid unnecessary hardware expenditures and ensure that resources are fully utilised, rather than sitting idle.
Furthermore, DolphinDB is designed to run on commodity hardware, enabling it to operate efficiently on widely available, cost-effective systems rather than relying on specialized, high-end equipment. This design allows organizations to reduce infrastructure costs by using off-the-shelf, general-purpose servers, avoiding the need for expensive, proprietary hardware typically required for high-performance databases.
Moreover, DolphinDB is designed to support a variety of cloud deployment approaches, offering the advantages of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. This flexibility allows organisations to scale resources up or down based on demand, resulting in more efficient resource utilisation.
Recommended Reading:
- The application of the time-series database DolphinDB at Yongfeng Securities in Taiwan
- Scale out a DolphinDB Cluster
- Data Rebalancing
- Unveiling the TSDB Engine Behind the Extreme Performance of DolphinDB (Video – Chinese)
- A Detailed Explanation of DolphinDB TSDB Storage Engine (in Chinese)
- DolphinDB Cloud Deployments (in Chinese)
3) Initial Setup Costs
With DolphinDB, organisations can benefit from significant cost savings during the initial setup, thanks to its deep experience in the financial industry and proven technical expertise in deploying across various environments.
DolphinDB was developed with a strong foundation in the financial industry, and the team behind it possesses deep domain expertise in financial services. This minimises knowledge gaps and communication barriers that often arise during the initial setup phase, reducing time and costs associated with the initial database design and migration of financial services-related data.
The DolphinDB team’s extensive experience in deploying the DolphinDB data platform across various environments enables quicker and easier installations. This reduces both time and complexity for organisations. With proven templates and strategies, the need for trial and error is minimised, saving time on troubleshooting and configuration.
In summary, by leveraging DolphinDB’s experience, organisations can achieve faster time-to-value, allowing them to start using the system and realising benefits more quickly. This is an advantage that open-source systems cannot offer.
Recommended Reading:
- Migrate to DolphinDB (in Chinese)
- DataX-based DolphinDB Data Import Tool (in Chinese)
4) Ongoing Administration & Operation Costs
DolphinDB abstracts the complexities of the underlying distributed system and offers a user-friendly interface with commands that DBAs can use without needing specialised knowledge in distributed databases. This makes the hiring of the DBAs roles much easier and cheaper.
In addition, DolphinDB provides a comprehensive list of built-in functions and tools to simplify and automate daily administration and maintenance tasks. This reduces the DBA’s time spent on routine DolphinDB management tasks. Furthermore, DolphinDB includes detailed logs and powerful log analysis tools, helping DBAs save time when locating exceptions.
More importantly, the support and expertise from the DolphinDB team ensure the sustainability that is critical for an organisation to operate properly. This is another key advantage DolphinDB has over other open-source alternatives.
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5) Expertise and User Productivity Costs
Now, let’s move on to the most variable and unpredictable costs, Expertise and User Productivity Costs, which organisations may sometimes be unaware of, but these are often the most expensive expenses.
To avoid the confusion on the terminology, I think it is worth clarifying which costs are included in this category. In this blog post, I define Expertise and User Productivity Costs as including:
- Costs of getting business users productive
- Costs of developing business solutions on DolphinDB
- Costs of maintaining internal supporting expertise
- Costs on external consulting services for complex and advanced tasks
Costs of Getting Business Users Productive
For a financial database/platform like DolphinDB, the primary business users are typically quants, business analysts, and mid- and back-office analysts, who are responsible for writing queries, performing calculations, and building models to solve specific business problems. The costs associated with getting these users productive can vary significantly depending on the learning curve, as well as the efficiency of the programming languages and tools utilised. In real-world projects, significant resource waste is often observed due to workforce inefficiencies. Team members with the right skills and the proper tool support can typically achieve over 10 times the productivity of those without the necessary expertise.
To get business users productive in their work, they either need additional training or can leverage their existing knowledge and experience with the system. The costs can be much higher when training users on a new language or workflow, as this involves not only the time spent learning but also the fact that the users’ previous experience cannot be directly applied.
DolphinDB was born in the financial industry, with the goal of simplifying and accelerating work for financial use cases. It not only offers SQL/Python-like languages familiar to users, but also includes a wide range of financial functions, algorithms, and plug-ins designed to enhance user productivity.
Costs of Developing Business Solutions on DolphinDB
DolphinDB is not merely a time-series database; it is also a platform for building customised financial solutions, such as integrated factor investment solutions, real-time cryptocurrency trading platforms, and FICC pricing and valuation engines. Developing these solutions requires cross-domain expertise and close collaboration from both business and IT teams.
However, in reality, the lack of cross-domain expertise is all too common, especially in the financial industry, which involves complex business logic and specialised knowledge. This gap between business and IT is a significant challenge and is often one of the primary reasons for project failures or delays. Without the necessary collaboration and understanding between both sides, projects can easily go off track, leading to misaligned objectives, increased costs, and extended timelines.
This is where DolphinDB’s expertise can be particularly valuable. As mentioned earlier, DolphinDB is deeply focused on the financial industry, with extensive experience in financial use cases and domain-specific knowledge. This expertise not only helps organisations take the most efficient path to delivering solutions but also serves as a bridge between the internal IT and business teams, facilitating smoother collaboration and alignment.
Costs of Maintaining Supporting Expertise
Internal or outsourced support expertise, including routine maintenance, user access control, and issue management, is essential for the stability of business-critical systems. The costs of maintaining support expertise include internal staff compensation, training and skill development, or the outsourced team’s service charges. As discussed earlier, DolphinDB abstracts the complexities of the underlying distributed system and simplifies the daily operation and maintenance tasks, making it easier for organisations to acquire supporting resources.
Costs of External Consulting Services
For complex tasks such as system architecture design, advanced optimisation, integration with other systems, or custom business solution development, external consultants with deep expertise in DolphinDB may be required.
I’ve always believed that if you can access real experts with experience gained from extensive solution implementations, it is much more cost-effective to bring them on board as early as possible. The cost savings from utilising their expertise and experience can be enormous. To put it bluntly, and perhaps not entirely ‘politically correct’, IT solution implementation is not a team game, and striving for complete consensus can be very damaging. Successful projects are often driven by a team member with extensive experience and a clear vision, rather than by consensus among all team members.
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Data Ninjago (Finsight-Tech Blogs) 