Note: You can now subscribe to our YouTube video channel for q/kdb+ tutorials. Well, I will tell you what they are not – tables! If you take away one thing from this post, it’s that keyed tables are poorly named and are not tables. However, after reading this post, you should have a better understanding …
Category Archives: Beginner
Understanding type casting in q
This post is a follow up to the previous post about datatypes in q. In that post, I went over all the datatypes available in q and how to identify them using character, numeric, or symbol representation. Now, we are ready to discuss another important topic in q: type casting. This post is also available …
Datatypes in q
In this post, we are going to cover all the datatypes available in the programming language, q. These datatypes are known as atoms in q because you cannot reduce them to a smaller datatype. These datatypes are also referred to as nouns and we will discuss why that is in another post when we discuss …
Getting started with data science
Recently, a few of my friends have shown interest in what I do and the skill set required for my job. For those who don’t know, I am a market data developer. This means that I work with time-series databases to capture and store both real-time and historical data. I am also responsible for writing …
Analyzing NYC traffic data using q
In my previous post, I analyzed some NYC traffic data using Pandas. In this post, I would like to perform the same analysis using q. As far as graphing is concerned, I won’t be showing that. q is not really used for graphing. You can use GUIs like qPad or qStudio to chart the data …
OOP concepts in q
Many of my friends (almost 90%) are programmers…object oriented programmers. They also have much more experience in programming than I do. Many of them have at least 4+ years of experience than me. I always hear them engaging in discussions about OOP concepts and to be honest, I feel left out sometimes. I have never …
qSQL queries for performing analytics
I realize that there are many developers out there that are not looking to get into q completely and are simply using q/kdb+ along with qsql to perform analytics (i.e. quants). My job requires all of this so I have some good experience running qsql queries. Of course, the type of query you need to …
Overview of kdb+ architecture
So far, I have covered quite a few intermediate topics without covering the basics. In this post, I would like to take a step back and talk about general architecture of kdb+. A simple kdb+ setup includes a feed handler (fh), a ticker plant (tp), a real-time database (rdb), and a historical database (hdb). These processes work …
Tables, keyed tables and dictionaries
When I first started learning q, I had a difficult time understanding the differences between tables, keyed tables and dictionaries. The differences seemed very subtle at the time. Just recently, I was explaining a colleague (java developer with some exposure to q/kdb) how you can check meta of a table, look up the keys and …