Updates the BcolzMinuteBarWriter.write api to allow users to pass their
data as a stream instead of requiring that they loop over their data
externally. This matches the API presented by BcolzDailyBarWriter.
Previously, whenever we try to access a missing value on the Positions
dict, we return a default Position and save it to the dict. Instead,
just return the Position
MAINT: add event date col field and filter rows where this field is null
TST: modify tests to filter nulls in event date col
MAINT: calculate value repeats by vectorized computation on separate start and end dates.
MAINT: pass DatetimeIndex instead of list of strings
The BcolzDailyBarReader was optimized for the pipeline case of reading
all assets at once.
Now that the reader is also used to support daily history the case of
reading a data for a small number of assets is more common, particularly
in algorithms that use the history API which have a high rotation of
assets (e.g. an algorithm which pipeline uses to set the active
universe)
Remove the bottleneck in reading a small number of assets by
conditionally reading the slice for each asset from the carray, instead
of reading the data for all equities and then indexing into that full
array. On a certain number of assets, it is still better to read all the
data at once. On the Quantopian dataset, which holds data for 20000
about for the last 10 years of equity data (where not all equities trade
over the full range), stored in 118 blosc blp files per column, the
tipping point where the 'read all' mode wins out between 3000-4000
assets.
That number was tested by trying to exercise a worst case scenario where
the equities were spread out evenly across the blp files, by stepping
along a sorted list of assets that were alive over a query range which
spanned 70 trading days.
```
size = 3000
sids = [assets[i] for i in range(0, len(assets), len(assets) /
size)][:size]
```
Also, add parameter to WithBcolzDailyBarReader fixture which allows the
test to specify what the threshold count for reading all data should be,
so that the test_us_equity_pricing can be forced into either mode to
make sure that both branches in logic are covered by all test cases.
On local dev machine this patch improves the read time of `load_raw_array`
for one asset from 100 ms to 96.5 µs. (10^5 improvement.) With reading
only asset per call a being an observed common case when populating the
non-cached values in USEquityHistoryLoader.
We were trying to use the previous day in before_trading_start because
we were looking for the previous market minute, then normalizing it. That's
no longer the case, as we want to use today's date for fetcher lookups
in before_trading_start.
Also refactored a bit how dataportal determines if a query should be
routed to the fetcher data structures.
Joe Jevnik