Behind the Build: Inside the Mind of the COPT Plugin’s Lead Developer
Welcome to this edition of DolphinDB “Behind the Build” — a series where we highlight the innovators and ecosystem partners building powerful extensions on top of DolphinDB.
Today, we are excited to feature Cardinal Operations, the team behind the copt plugin, which brings high-performance mathematical optimization directly into the DolphinDB environment.
01 — Could you briefly introduce Cardinal Operations to the DolphinDB community?
Cardinal Operations was founded in 2016 by four Stanford PhDs and is a leading provider of intelligent decision-making technologies in China. We developed COPT, China’s first high-performance intelligent optimization solver, and built a full-stack decision-making ecosystem spanning intelligent compute, optimization engines, decision platforms, and industry-focused solutions.
02 — What motivated you to develop a DolphinDB plugin?
DolphinDB and COPT serve highly overlapping groups of users across quantitative finance, risk management, and supply chain optimization. These users share the same challenge: How can they perform mathematical modeling and optimization directly where the data resides — without slow and costly data transfers?
DolphinDB’s well-designed plugin ecosystem offered a natural solution. By developing the copt plugin, we enabled users to call the COPT solver directly from DolphinDB scripts, embedding optimization seamlessly into their data analysis and decision-making pipelines.
03 — What are the key advantages of the copt plugin?
The copt plugin enables tight integration between data storage and high-performance optimization compute. Users can model and solve optimization problems natively within DolphinDB, eliminating overhead from cross-language data movement and format conversions.
This dramatically improves end-to-end workflow efficiency and allows decision processes to run much closer to the underlying data.
04 — What stood out to you during the development process?
At the early stage, we were still getting familiar with the DolphinDB environment. Thanks to the DolphinDB community team’s detailed documentation and responsive technical support, we quickly overcame integration challenges and deepened our understanding of the plugin ecosystem.
During plugin review, DolphinDB’s feedback highlighted the importance of comprehensive testing. We added test cases for every feature, uncovered and fixed previously overlooked bugs, and further optimized core functionality.
05 — What impressed you most about DolphinDB?
Two aspects stood out:
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These greatly accelerated our development speed and improved overall quality.
06 — What future plans do you have for the copt plugin?
We will continue enhancing the plugin by extending functionality and responding quickly to user feedback.
Looking forward, we hope to collaborate more deeply with DolphinDB in both technology and ecosystem development — jointly providing customers with a complete end-to-end intelligent decision-making pipeline, from data → modeling → optimization → execution.
About the copt Plugin
The DolphinDB copt plugin, developed by Cardinal Operations, integrates the COPT optimization solver directly into DolphinDB’s high-performance computing engine. It allows users to build, solve, and analyze mathematical optimization models without any data migration, truly enabling “data-in-place decisioning.”
About the DolphinDB Plugin Marketplace
The DolphinDB Plugin Marketplace offers over 70 professional plugins, covering data access, numerical computing, machine learning, cloud services, and more. These plugins empower users to extend DolphinDB’s capabilities and significantly improve efficiency across real-world business scenarios.
Interested in the copt plugin? For plugin access, technical details, or collaboration opportunities, please contact us at: info@dolphindb.com.
Learn more about us: https://dolphindb.com/
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