RAP is available in two versions: RAP - The Trading Edition Standard (RAP Standard) and RAP - The Trading Edition Enterprise (RAP Enterprise).
Both versions consolidate market data from vendor feeds, historical time series data, real-time trades and quotes (TAQ) data, and reference data into one integrated analytics platform. RAP allows you to process market data, send it over the network, and load messages into the appropriate data stores, including both an in-memory cache database that provides immediate data access, and a historical repository that can manage massive historical and corporate reference data sets efficiently. The historical repository supports advanced data compression, clustered deployments and OLAP analytics.
RAP Enterprise includes all the functionality of RAP Standard, but also includes the following additional features and options that are not available in RAP Standard:
New SQL functions for financial time series and forecasting analysis. The time series SQL functions call two integrated third-party libraries, the IMSL C Stat and C Math libraries, developed by Visual Numerics. The IMSL libraries contain C functions that implement sophisticated time series analytics. The historical repository automatically loads the IMSL libraries as needed when a valid SQL function is called. For further information please see the Sybase IQ 15.1 New Features Summary.
RAP Enteprise incorporates the In-database Analytics—Partner Solutions option, which supports user-defined scalar and aggregate functions that incorporate proprietary and commercial statistical and mathematical libraries written in C/C++ directly within the historical repository’s high-performance user-defined function (UDF) execution environment.
RAP Enterprise incorporates the VLDB (Very Large Database) features offer range partitioning and the ability to perform finely-tuned data placement, i.e. placing less critical data on cheaper storage. This feature set is often referred to as hierarchical storage management. For further information please see the Sybase IQ 15.1 System Administration Guide: Volume 1.
The highly scalable grid technology in the historical repository can be optionally scaled out to clusters of any size, enabling concurrent data loads and queries via independent data processing nodes connected to a shared disk multiplex. Adding more than two servers to the multiplex requires a new licensable option for RAP Enterprise: RAP Multiplex Option. For further information please see the Using Sybase IQ 15.1 Multiplex Guide.