Quote Source

Venice currently supports three methods for reading in quotes. It can read in quotes directly from files containing quotes in MetaStock, EzyChart or Insight Trader. It can read in quotes stored in a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. And finally it can read in some inbuilt sample quotes, so you can test out Venice. Reading from files is quick and easy to set up - but access is much slower than from database. It is recommended that you set up access for files to start with and if you plan to use Venice to switch to the database.

You can only access quotes directly from files, if each file contains only a single day's worth of quotes. If any of your quote files contain more than one date, you'll need to access your quote files from the Database Quote Source instead

You can reach the quote source configuration page by:

File Quote Source

Once you have reached the quote source page, to tell Venice to read quotes directly from files click on the Files tab and select the Use Files radio button. You'll need to know the format of your quote files. Venice supports the following:

You can then tell Venice where the quotes files are by either adding them here with the Add button or by using the Import Quotes dialog.

You can only access quotes directly from files, if each file contains only a single day's worth of quotes. If any of your quote files contain more than one date, you'll need to access your quote files from the Database Quote Source. instead

Database Quote Source

Once you have played with Venice for a while you might get annoyed at the time it takes Venice to load quotes from files. You can fix this by reading quotes from a database. Currently Venice only supports reading quotes from a MySQL or a PostgreSQL database. To read quotes from a database, you'll need to download a copy of the database and the relevant Java software driver (JDBC) that lets Venice talk to the database.

You can download MySQL from http://www.mysql.com and you can also download a software driver from them too. Their software driver is available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-jdbc-stable.html. Venice also supports a software driver called mm.mysql which is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mmmysql. Both are good, get either, although I use the latter. Once the database is set up you'll need to create a database for Venice, call the database shares.

Once all that is done, you'll need to configure Venice to use the database. From the quote source page, to tell Venice to read quotes from the database click on the Database tab and select the Use Database radio button. You'll be confronted with several fields you need to fill in:

Finally you'll need to import the quotes into the database, you can do this by using the Import Quotes dialog.

Good luck!

With the current version you might get an error message saying that it can't find a table. If you get this, it probably means that you haven't imported any quotes into Venice yet. Venice will automatically create its required tables the first time you import quotes. For reference, this is the format of the SQL shares table:

+--------+----------+------+-----+------------+-------+
| Field  | Type     | Null | Key | Default    | Extra |
+--------+----------+------+-----+------------+-------+
| date   | date     |      | PRI | 0000-00-00 |       |
| symbol | char(12) |      | PRI |            |       |
| open   | float    | YES  |     | 0          |       |
| close  | float    | YES  |     | 0          |       |
| high   | float    | YES  |     | 0          |       |
| low    | float    | YES  |     | 0          |       |
| volume | int(11)  | YES  |     | 0          |       |
+--------+----------+------+-----+------------+-------+

Sample Quote Source

Venice has some inbuilt sample quotes, so you can test out Venice without going to all the trouble of importing stock quotes. It contains a small selection of quotes from the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) from 1986.