STAC Bi-Temporal Data SIG intro call on October 7

A topic made more urgent by regulatory and risk management trends. The first teleconference of the STAC Bi-Temporal Data Special Interest Group will be October 7 at 11am Eastern US / 4pm UK time. This will be a brief call to outline the scope and solicit feedback on the SIG's agenda. Click here to register your interest in this call or to get more information. Regulatory scrutiny and new risk management requirements are bringing the topic of bi-temporal data front and center for many trading firms. Bi-temporal data (or BTD) are data for which changes are recorded over two independent dimensions of time: "valid time" (the period during which a fact is true for the business) and "transaction time" (the period during which a fact is stored in a database). That is: "What did we know, and when did we know it?" In addition to risk management and regulatory reporting, trading firms use BTD in applications ranging from back-testing of trading strategies to P&L Explain. The problem is that current BTD solutions tend to be home-grown, fragile, and slow. Developing and maintaining them is costly; query performance and data-maintenance performance is poor; and deriving data or migrating schemas is overly complex. Database vendors are just beginning to embed BTD functionality into their DBMS engines, facilitated by new extensions to SQL. This promises to radically improve the situation. But vendors and customers alike are just starting to grapple with how those products should behave and how they should perform. The STAC Bi-Temporal Data Special Interest Group (BTD SIG) is a group of end-user organizations and vendors that will meet periodically to discuss key issues related to BTD. This will probably include the specification of performance benchmarks but will also cover functionality and other topics of interest to the community. Initial meetings are planned for October and November 2011. All end-user firms (brokerages, exchanges, hedge funds, etc.) on the STAC Benchmark Council member list may attend these 2011 meetings irrespective of their membership level. If you are with an end-user firm that is not already on the member list, your firm can become an Observer Member for no charge. More details about eligibility for different kinds of organizations are in the Q&A linked at the site above.