STAC Releases New Market Data Benchmark With Results From Kx and Oracle

NEW YORK, June 21, 2010 - The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC(R)) today released
STAC-M3TM Benchmark results for a solution from Kx Systems and Oracle
Corporation. STAC-M3 provides a common measuring methodology for solutions
that manage large timeseries datasets (tick databases). The measurement
standard is currently a community proposal developed by the STAC Benchmark
Council (www.stacresearch.com/members), comprised of trading
organizations and vendors. The Council defines a series of standard
benchmarks for capital market workloads, though interestingly only trading
organizations - and not vendors - can approve specific tests, which ensures
the benchmarks have relevance to real-world trading demands. To complete the
inaugural benchmark testing on timeseries data, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) worked
with Kx Systems, using Kx's kdb+. The results have now set the standard for
a series of benchmark tests to be carried out over the next few months.

The ability to quickly analyze timeseries of price and trade data is
crucial for firms which trade financial instruments such as stocks,
currencies, options and other derivatives. The growth of high-frequency
trading makes it important for firms to rapidly store, retrieve and analyze
massive quantities of data in order to back-test new trading algorithms,
monitor their risk, and satisfy regulatory demands. At the same time, surging
data volumes brought about by computerized trading make these tasks
increasingly challenging in markets which can 'tick' (publish changes to
prices) millions of times per second.

Peter Lankford, founder & director of STAC, said: "We're pleased that Kx
and Oracle have taken the lead in publishing STAC-M3 Benchmarks. This testing
responds to a direct need for performance data expressed by some of the
world's leading financial institutions. We look forward to further benchmark
results from Kx and Oracle, as well as other vendors of software and hardware
that can be used for managing large timeseries of data."

Simon Garland, Kx chief strategist, said: "We have worked closely with
STAC and Oracle to create benchmarks. Going forward, the benchmarks will give
financial institutions clearly defined criteria for measuring the performance
of their systems. When setting up large, critical databases people need to be
sure that the configuration they use is delivering the best possible
performance within their hardware and software constraints. The problem is
nobody has the time and resources to do an in-depth evaluation of all the
alternatives and ideally to regularly revisit the chosen solution. These new
benchmarks from STAC are valuable components of these decisions."

This series of tests is designed to set a standard for future benchmarks
to be carried out by STAC in conjunction with various vendors. The results
are vital for financial institutions needing to address their CEP
requirements, facing the pressures of constantly increasing data volumes and
regulatory demands. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is the first benchmark
standard for market data timeseries (tick) databases, allowing vendors to
measure their performance and financial institutions to test their own
systems.

The STAC-M3 Benchmark standards will accelerate market selection of new
technologies by enabling user firms and vendors to measure the performance of
their database solutions in a common way. Trading firms will be able to
quickly assess the benefit of innovations at all layers of the tick-database
'stack' including application software, operating systems, processors,
servers, and storage architectures.

Amir Halfon, Oracle's senior director of financial services technology,
added: "Oracle's unique storage server, the Sun Fire X4540, allowed us to
achieve extreme performance with Kx by placing the data as close to the CPUs
as possible. The Sun Fire X4540 provides fast, high throughput access between
the threads of execution and the storage subsystem, offering up to 96TB of
storage in a compact, cost-effective package. The tight integration between
compute and storage within the Sun Fire X4540 eliminates the need for an
external SAN and provides an ideal platform for high-performance analytics
solutions such as Kx kdb+."

The STAC-verified benchmarks were carried out using Kx kdb+ v2.6 on the
Oracle Sun Fire X4540 storage server using version 0.92 of the STAC-M3
Benchmark specifications. STAC-M3 v0.92 has been submitted to the full
Council for ratification, and a vote is pending.

The benchmark report is available at www.STACresearch.com/kx.

Notes to editors

About STAC

www.STACresearch.com

About Oracle

www.oracle.com

About Kx

Kx offers a unified approach to real-time and historical data analysis
with its high-performance kdb+ database platform. kdb+ provides a portable
64-bit implementation of our expressive query and programming language to
analyze and store streaming events, manipulate in-memory and on-disk
databases, and build distributed low-latency applications.

Our focus is on delivering the best performance and
flexibility for high-volume, data-intensive analytics and applications. We
built the technology. You build your business. For more information visit
kx.com

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or
its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

    Editorial Contacts:
    John Norris
    Moonlight Media
    Tel: +44(0)20-7250-4770
    +44(0)7774-777-597
    Email: john@moonlightmedia.co.uk

Editorial Contacts: John Norris, Moonlight Media, Tel: +44(0)20-7250-4770, +44(0)7774-777-597, Email: john at moonlightmedia.co.uk