Hacker News Reader

I also first used MongoDB but I switched to cassandra and I find it much better.

MongoDB was bad for this case because it devours memory and it lacks a primary key (so saving a tick that's already creates a second tick).

cassandra is better (it has a PK, although it's a bit weird because of its distributed-first attitude) but in the long run I think postgres would be even better (because it's space efficient).

Apart from that I use some Java libraries and clojure/incanter and program the rest around it myself.

QuantConnect.com has tick data for every stock in the US universe back to 1998 -- its roughly 4TB of data.

They don't have options data, but you might check out QuantConnect or Quantopian if you're interested in stocks and FX.

Have you tried quantopian.com ?