Karachi Stock Exchange

Market Information System
A comprehensive, graphical, client-server Market Information System developed in Oracle Enterprise Server and Developer/2000 that captures all trades that take place on the KSE trading floor and then disseminates market data to all other parties outside Pakistan. This system was the first client-server software application developed for Karachi Stock Exchange, and was a landmark achievement in that respect. 

Karachi Stock Exchange used to operate on the outcry mode of trading. All trades are entered in the Market Information System and subsequently disseminated to the more than 150 active members who view the trades either through TV or the PC. All stock exchange statistics are calculated via Oracle job queues, while database alerts were used to display stock announcements.

Previously, KSE was using a character-based system developed in Informix. During the analysis phase, this system was also carefully studied. After normalized data structures were constructed, the entire legacy data was ported onto Oracle using PL/SQL and SQL*Loader. It was decided during the analysis phase that the system architecture will be three-tiered instead of two-tiered in order to reduce the network traffic and centralize all business rules using database triggers and procedures. Since this was an extremely mission-critical system, redundancy was provided by using RAID Level5 for the Main Server. The backup server was identical to the Main Server in which data was continuously updated using advanced replication features of Oracle. 

After the system went live, the two systems were run in parallel for 3 weeks, after which the old system was shut down. 

Computerization of Accounts Department
The entire Accounts Department is being run on software developed by PowerWare for the last 3 years.