Question: My firm is looking for an out-of-the-box database system to store and query high-frequency tick data. What are the best options? It seems that kdb+ is the market leader in this field.

Answer: 
kdb+ seems to be the leader but their programming language is a pain really. Personally I use a HDF5. It is a No-SQL database. It integrates very nicely with python.

I have been very happy with it so far.
velocity analytics might be a choice.