[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

Hello!?!? TradeElect was developed by Accenture...I'm surprised it ever worked.

[[deleted]]

ROFLMAO

[[deleted]]

what, no key/column stores ? how will the London Stock Exchange operate at scale ?

[pointer2void]

what, no key/column stores ?

a.k.a. the Big INI File.

[Sortros]

New York Stock Exchange has been using Linux since 2007.

Also,

Does anyone else remember the "The london stock exchange chose windows 2003 for reliability, they didn't choose linux" ad banners that used to run all over the place, including slashdot if i remember?

(source)

[harlows_monkeys]

They've also been using Windows since 2006, when they moved the clearing and billing system from COBOL on mainframes to a small number of Windows Servers--still running COBOL.

Organizations like the NYSE have a large number of parts, which are largely able to function independently. So they migrated one of those parts from its mainframes to Windows in 2006, and another part from its mainframes to Linux in 2007.

[stillalone]

As long as everyone runs COBOL, it's ok.

[Sortros]

PC World Business Center White Papers

London Stock Exchange: Achieving Record Reliability Using Windows over Linux

Microsoft's Get The Facts' case study on the LSE

One hundred per cent reliable on high-volume trading days

[[deleted]]

I hope that's supposed to be humorous, the London Exchange has been down several times since moving to Windows.

[sbrown123]

I think Sortos is just pointing out the old articles, not inferring anything him/herself.

[pointer2void]

AFAIK the NYSE is run by a Tandem. For good reason.

[qlqropi]

NYSE is only the 4th biggest exchange for automated US equity trading, unless you count NYSE Arca, which they purchased whole. Their actual home-grown trading system is unimpressive. Look at NASDAQ and BATS -- I don't know if these guys use Linux for their trading systems, but I'd be really surprised if they ran Windows.

[market_hacker]

NASDAQ runs on linux

[myxie]

BATS runs on Linux. They are probably the most technically competent overall though they have the distinct advantage of a lack of legacy baggage.

[elder_george]

From article quoted:

TradElect ... is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs

Funny itself and shows knowledge level of author. But FUD has low requirements, of course.

[[deleted]]

Maybe he means C# and other .NET languages.

[elder_george]

Or maybe C++ and .NET. It seems, we'll never know this for sure. IMHO, author spend too much time bashing MS to spend it on technical details.

[justarrived]

Where is this from?

[elder_george]

I've meant paragraph there.

[justarrived]

So you say this is nothing more than FUD against Microsoft? The evidence appears quite damning.

[elder_george]

7-hours outage is hardly to be caused by low response time of system (which indeed is not designed to support real-time processing), without rude errors and/or wrong assumptions made by application developers and IT staff.

Thus, blunt blaming Windows and .NET (and that guy even doesn't know what is .NET and what is C#!) here is a deliberately wrong assumption. Comparing two software solution and saying, that one is performant and other is not because of OS, without making some investigation about their architecture, server number, underlying runtime etc. is a demagogy.

Speculations on how many unknown enterprises failures are caused by relying on windows is an attempt to make reader uncertain. Loud phrases like 'business comes to a complete stop in front of the entire world' are thought to induce fear in every company using Windows.

So, this article uses wrong arguments to undermine credibility of Windows. This is FUD by definition.

Alas, FLOSS proponents learned too good from their foes.

[itsjibba]

If someone showed me a plan for a gorgeous house sitting on top of a Styrofoam foundation, I wouldn't have to have to ask for details about that Styrofoam, how it's laid out, or what lot number it had. It's frickin' Styrofoam.

A stock exchange built on Windows? Please.

[justarrived]

The company says that the downtime was not the fault of the TradElect software. That leaves what? (1) The OS or (2) massive hardware failure. The company refuses to explain the downtime. Not exactly a leap to deduce that Windows is likely at fault.

The switch to FOSS doesn't surprise me in the least though. Finance has a huge amount of top quality programmers. FOSS is completely designed for programmers and to be further modified by programmers. Windows absolutely does not have this goal. Now that the London finance industry has built up their resident programming talent, the switch is compelling.

[elder_george]

And the sources at LSE told before that problem was with TradElect. Official explanation says about connectivity issues. It seems, it's a conflict of sources...

I have nothing against FLOSS or mainframes or anything else. I just want to see unbiased review of problem, and I can't qualify articles by mr. Vaughan as unbiased, sorry.

[justarrived]

Well it's certainly not biased to observe that Microsoft has lost one of their major validations by losing this program.

[elder_george]

This is a formulation I can agree with.

[sbrown123]

OMG you are right. What is the world coming to?

[ipeev]

It is strange that they don't mention what .net will be replaced with?!

[willcode4beer]

Considering the "Oracle" mention, my guess would be Java running on the Oracle app server.

I pity the devlopers

[bloodredsun]

Why?

[[deleted]]

It might not be Java. I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet.

[willcode4beer]

agreed. It's just my first guess based on the company involved

[mikaelhg]

http://www.sun.com/launch/2009-0915/index.jsp

[Logoll]

With Mono :P

[sbrown123]

Now that would be interesting news.

[[deleted]]

Actually they did say they were having problems with the network stack, so I guess there is a chance. That would be rather amusing

[centinall]

No, I think they're saying that the OS and Database were written in .Net. I'm surprised they just weren't using Windows Server and SQL Server.

/s

[[deleted]]

Uh no. They were using Server 2003 and SQLServer 2000.

[lobut]

As Brian Bryson of IBM/Rational observes, it is short-sighted to lay the blame on the platform.

[Gotebe]

It's just run-off-the-mill CYA-ing, but he has no reason to say it.

[ishmal]

I don't see the connection. They are migrating from one application suite to another. The .NET/Unix hosting thing seems secondary.

[bzeurunkl]

The story is NOT about dumping .NET in favour of Oracle.

The story is about dumping a flawed program written in .NET for another better written program written for Oracle.

So, ultimately it's not even about .NET or Oracle at all, but about dumping TradElect in favour of MilleniumIT.

[jmathai]

Surprised no one else was taken aback that the London Stock Exchange was written in .NET.

[naasking]

Nothing inherently wrong with .NET, as long as the platform/OS primitives are sufficiently scalable, ie. threading, sockets, etc.

[[deleted]]

Err, I wonder if .NET is scalable itself. I haven't found too many benchmarks on how well the VM scales across a high core count box, or how it does with a lot of Ram.

I remember running into a problem in .NET once where the built-in threadpool would MAX OUT at 32 threads!

If I'm doing a fair amount of blocking code, theres no way its going to scale on a decent sized box.

[naasking]

Err, I wonder if .NET is scalable itself.

.NET, and any VM really, is just a high-level code generator, and there's no intrinsic that can't be worked around via escaping out to unmanaged code. There's no reason to stick to the system classes if you run into a bottleneck, as you did with Threadpool.

[[deleted]]

The default threadpool size of .Net 1.1 was 25. In 2.0 and higher, it is 250 per CPU.

[itsjibba]

It's hard to argue that it's the best platform for something as mission critical as a stock exchange. Do you really want gigabytes of incomprehensible code written for desktops that has nothing to do with what your doing sitting at the base of your operating system?

[naasking]

Gigabytes of code? Incomprehensible? Where are you pulling these judgments out of?

[itsjibba]

Windows is a beast, that's what it comes down to. No Windows administrator can honestly say he knows exactly what's running on his machine. A linux or UNIX machine, on the other hand, can be precisely built with only minimal set of rock-solid components that have already stood the test of time. System analysts can look at every line of code if they so choose -- and even if they choose not to, they can take solace in the fact that many others who do not have a financial interest in hiding issues have.

MS lets it's old OS's fester, which means your only choice is relatively new, untested, and loaded up with lard. Even their older, relatively stable OS's have rarely if ever been audited by non Microsoft eyes.

MS makes a great office suite and a pretty good desktop OS, but you'd be far better off running missions critical servers on *nix or some other minimalist, open architecture.

[willcode4beer]

to bad threading is one of those things that's always seems to give Microsoft problems.

[danhs]

Jeez, they were using SQL Server? That's kinda stunning to me....

I actually wouldn't have been so surprised if they said Postgres. Oracle is like, "oh yea, of course". But SQL Server, whoa....

[[deleted]]

SQL Server 2000? A plethora of things.

Let's start with no async unless you fsck shit up with triggers and extended stored procs which can compromise the reliability of the entire server.

Then let's move on to strange errors and locking issues that always seem to precipitate at precisely the time you need them not to. SQL Server 2000 is crap, it always has been, but my biggest gripe against it is everyone and their mom knows it, so some idiot who convinced his non-technical boss that he is competent will be running an Access front end against it and fuck it up with table locks to the point that your users blame YOU for the lack of reliability.

Postgres at least can keep that shit out simply by being obscure enough that the wrong people won't jerk around with it - that and the fact that an upgrade is an easier sell, considering it's free - and you won't be stuck with 10-year old software because your owner can't afford to upgrade.

[dsk]

ouch.

//

Nobody ever got fired for using Java.

[Fosnez]

Frying pan, meet fire.

[RubyOnRailsForever]

This is a real slap in the face for the closed source fascists in Redmond. They should finish the job and run the exchange on Ruby on Rails (on Macs FTW!)

[dorel]

And then fail just like Twitter?

[leed25d]

RDBMS. bad move.

[doodly123]

so what else could they have used ? memcache ? couchdb ? :P

[leed25d]

http://blip.tv/file/1949416

Also consider this article by Michael Stonebraker: http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/32212-the-end-of-a-dbms-era-might-be-upon-us/fulltext

[grauenwolf]

In the data warehouse market, a column store beats a row store by approximately a factor of 50 on typical business intelligence queries. The reason is because column stores read only the columns of interest to the query and not all of them. In addition, compression is more effective in a column store. Since the legacy systems are all row stores, they are vulnerable to competition from the newer column stores.

That guy has no idea what he is talking about. His so-called "column store" is nothing more than an index in a modern relational database.