Tick Data
Tick data is the most granular form of financial market data. It records every individual trade and quote, each timestamped to the microsecond or finer. It is the raw material for backtesting, market analysis, and trade reconstruction.
Why tick data is demanding
Every time a price changes or an order is placed, that is a tick. Across thousands of instruments on busy venues, this produces an enormous volume of timestamped records, often billions per day. Storing and querying it is one of the hardest data problems in finance.
Quant teams need tick data to backtest strategies against exactly what happened, to the microsecond. Compliance teams need it to reconstruct trading activity. Both need to query across huge histories quickly, which strains storage budgets and query engines alike.
This is the data that made specialized databases like kdb+ famous, and expensive.
How Arc handles Tick Data
Arc stores tick data as columnar Parquet on storage you own, queryable with standard SQL. Teams use it to keep deep tick history for backtesting without the per-core licensing cost of traditional tick databases, and without locking the data in a proprietary format.
Arc is a high-performance columnar database. Open Parquet on storage you own, single Go binary, production-ready in 30 seconds.