This is a non-relational database, which is well suited for things like raw tick data, where you are not querying them by values, but instead by an indexed time and symbol field.

To give you an idea of why this is important, take a look at their white paper from 2006 on performance. In a transacted environment they achieved 125,486 single record writes per second. With modern 2009 hardware, and multiple CPU / Solid State Disk systems, this could readily record every single tick coming off of the NYSE and NASDAQ (multiple million per second).

Check them out at Oracle Berkeley DB. I’m in the process of testing this out for our historical logging, and am very impressed so far, even on commodity hardware.