>>what special needs does Bloomberg have that would lead to a primarily non-engineering company investing the resources to create this
They probably open sourced the database, and would do more -- to dispel the above notion, and therefore to attract more qualified recruits.
Financial services companies, and technology suppliers around them, have came up much of the 'modern day' tech, some times decade(s), before google's and facebook's of the world
-- have had NoSQL with stored procs(eg Goldman S, early to mid 90s ),
-- in-house grown programming lang (APL+ based in Morgan Stanley) emphasizing vector-based operations
-- Smart contracts
https://www.lexifi.com/product/technology/contract-description-language
(where a contract is represented as algorithm specified in a domain specific language)
). This was way before etherium, started, I believe, in Credit Swiss (but not sure)
-- one of the fastest time series database (kdb+)
-- Data science and machine learning (modeling risk and valuations)
Today's hedge funds manage petabytes of data.
So do many of the big investment banks...
They probably open sourced the database, and would do more -- to dispel the above notion, and therefore to attract more qualified recruits.
Financial services companies, and technology suppliers around them, have came up much of the 'modern day' tech, some times decade(s), before google's and facebook's of the world
Today's hedge funds manage petabytes of data. So do many of the big investment banks...