kdb+ Twitter Feed Handler

Typical feed handlers for kdb+ are for market data and trade data such as bloomberg B-Pipe or reuters market feeds. These feeds typically contain ticker symbol, bid price, ask price and the time. We’ve been working on something a little different, a twitter feed handler. With this feed handler you can subscribe to:

  • A random sample of all tweets
  • Certain search queries
  • Locations, tweets for any trending queries will be downloaded for those areas

For each tweet we have associated meta data that includes: location, language, time of posting and number of favourites/retweets.

kdb+ Twitter Feed Handler

The video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player. If you are using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Adobe Flash Player by downloading here.

Now that we have our data in kdb+ we can analyse it like any other time-series data and look for interesting patterns. If you have worked on anything similar I would love to hear about it (john AT timestored.com). I find treating social media data as time-series data throws up many interesting possibilities, in future blog posts I’ll start digging into the data..

At TimeStored we have previously implemented a number of market data feed handlers. Handling reconnections, failover, data backfilling and data enrichment can be a tricky problem to get right, if you need a feed handler developed we provide kdb+ development, consulting and support services, please contact us.

Basic examples of Java kdb+ Feed handlers and C Feed Handlers are available on the site.

4 Responses to “kdb+ Twitter Feed Handler”


  1. vinod sharma

    hey John
    I worked in kdb/q for a year and now moved into bigdata.Am into doing analytics on social media data. I am looking forward to use kdb as my datastore .
    So can you share the source code for twitter feed handler.

  2. Mohit

    This is quite cool! Is the code for the Twitter Feed Handler hosted somewhere?

  3. Ryan Hamilton
  4. 花灿

    轻松便利的新方法带给你最大的感觉就是“好玩又快捷”。这样有助于收缩毛孔,老得更快。谢谢合作!某些有过敏性皮肤病者。