I don't know what database system Quantopian is using for its pricing data, but if it is an RDBMS it would be interesting to be able to run SQL queries on it directly, rather than having to load everything into memory before processing it.
For example, something as simple as that (returning the total number of daily bars per date) would become possible:
SELECT date, COUNT(*) AS count
FROM daily_pricing
GROUP BY date;
Or creating 30-minute bars within the RDBMS instead of having to first get the 1-minute bars and process them in memory, etc.
What is the opinion of Quantopian on this?