TimeStored Blog

Pulse 0.15.4 Released – Linked Tables/Charts

Linked Tables and Charts

Since our last blogged release our biggest new feature is Linked Tables and Charts.
When a user clicks on a table or chart, it populates variables that can be used within other charts and tables.
One very creative user already used this to create tableA that when clicked populates tableB, that when click populates tableC and so on 4 levels deep.
Click the image below to see details and to find a tutorial video.

Stability

With increasing users comes more edge cases that are hard to predict in advance. We’ve invested a lot in stability in the last 2 months, not all of which will be immediately visible. One hotspot involved a number of issues related to websockets including internal firewall rules, cloudflare websocket timeouts and slow subscribers. One of the more interesting changes was introducing a heartbeat on the websocket to prevent timeouts, we then reused that heartbeat to detect slow subscribers for example when someone moves a tab to the background or minimizes their browser. We now smartly throttle back their querying until they catch up or bring the browser back to being visibile. We’ve addressed all known issues and added a number of stress testing test runs to ensure they always continue to work in future.

REST API

Lastly, some of our advanced kdb users spin up dynamic processes for users. They wanted to make those servers available in Pulse.
We’ve added a REST API to allow setting servers dynamically using a API keys.

Roadmap to Pulse 1.0

0.6.5 release in July 2022

For our initial release of Pulse we had 4 essential use cases that we solved. This included:

1. Trade Blotter – Scrolling real-time table of trades.
2. TAQ – Trade and Quote graph of teal-time quotes
3. A live updating current price table with color highlighting.
4. A simple time-series graph to plot single metrics. e.g. mid price over time.

1.0 Release March 2023

Pulse is a tool for real-time interactive dashboards.
Over the last few months we focussed on adding new visualizations , allowing charts/tables to be customized and supporting QuestDB.

The goal for 1.0 is:

• Increased Interactivity – To allow user interaction
  • Click Actions
  • Right Click Menus
  • Buttons that can trigger actions
• Support for large deployments
  • Dynamically updating data sources – For when db server deployments can change host/port
  • Licensing – builtin
  • Reporting tools – to show current and historical dashboard usage
  • Possible custom connection to user to allow security.
• Stability
  • Warn when dashboard is growing very large
  • websocket heartbeat to prevent idle disconnects
• Improved User Friendliness
  • Help debugging variables in queries
  • Improved onboarding – create conn, add dashboard, add table – all made obvious.

NOT in 1.0 but still on the long term roadmap is grid UI improvements , scripting and further expanding data sources.

Pulse 0.13.5 Adds Sparklines and Dynamic HTML

Pulse – Real-time interactive Dashboards 0.13.5 adds Sparkline and Dynamic HTML support

• Dynamic HTML – Full user control to generate HTML using template languages
• Sparklines – Embed small charts within a table by specifying nested arrays.

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Pulse is designed to provide real-time interactive dashboards so the underlying database has to be really fast. Pulse can support almost any data source, the question is which databases are worth supporting.

Time-series databases are the fastest growing database sector (image below).
The great news is that in the last few years there has been a a lot of interesting new entrants. So we’ve updated our past articles:

1. Top Column-Oriented Databases – DuckDB, Clickhouse and Doris are the new exciting entrants. Benchmark results in article.
2. Top Time-Series Databases – Have exploded in popularity. QuestDB and TimeScale are the new entrants there.  Benchmark results in article.

Building kdb+ Trader Dashboards

Pulse – kdb+ Streaming Subscriptions

Pulse – Developing fast thanks to users

A massive thanks for those that got in touch last month to wish us well on our new product launch. It has been exciting seeing the uptake and receiving user feedback. A particularly big thanks to JP/VS/JC/IL and MC.

Based on user requests, the largest developments since last month have been:

1. Security integration – to allow firm wide rollout. We now support both Apache proxies and kdb based authentication.
2. Chart Customization – Configuration of 100+ chart attributes from the UI.
3. Improved PostgreSQL support – Expanded query support and updated drivers.

If you need fast visualization or tableau is proving too slow, this is your chance to get in early and help steer development to solve your problem.

Contact us, if you have any feedback or need assistance with configuration.
Issues can be posted to github and source is available for customers.

Pulse – kdb+ Streaming Subscriptions

Pulse – example customization

Pulse – Real-time kdb+ data visualization

// Real-time kdb+ data visualization

Pulse is a tool that allows you to create and share real-time interactive dashboards with your team.

It’s been almost ten years since the launch of qStudio and our original sqlDashboards.
We have seen the need for fast real-time interactive dashboards increase.
Quants increasingly want to build, deploy and roll out visualizations faster and more reliably.

As such we are excited to annnounce Pulse, an HTML5/react based solution that allows you to build a dashboards based on kdb+ or postgresql or mysql data.

It’s early days and the product is under heavy development:

• New features will be released at least monthly
• We expect to offer a 1 year license for £199
• A free 50-day trial version can be downloaded at timestored.com/pulse

If you have a need for fast visualizations that you haven’t solved or tableau is proving too slow, this is your chance to get in early and help steer development to solve your problem.

Pulse – as a qStudio alternative

qStudio is the number one code editor, server browser and development environment for kdb+.
Today we are launching Pulse, a real-time SQL visualization tool for almost any SQL database.
Within Pulse we have recreated almost all the functionality of qStudio in web form.

If you’ve ever wanted to:

• Share queries and results
• Run analysis from any machine with a browser without a need to install qStudio
• Chart results using a modern charting library

You should consider using Pulse as a shared HTML5 based complement to qStudio..

As you can see below, pulse can be made to look almost the exact same as qStudio. It features the familiar configurable layout with a table/console/charting result panel that allows you to see your result in all formats at once.

Additionally you can

• Bookmark,copy and share links
• Use it with kdb+, postgresql, mysql, oracle and H2 databases
• Try many more chart types including 3D.

Try Pulse Now