Kickfire is de-cloaking
Kickfire, the renamed C2, is doing one of those buzz-building rollouts in which they make sure the first word comes from people on their payroll golly-gee-whizzing. You can see those at Xarpb and Diamond Notes, as well as a forthcoming article in MySQL magazine. Farhan Mashraqi also appears to be involved. Kickfire is also sponsoring the MySQL user conference next week.
I plan to write more after I get some substance, but a few things seem clear:
1. Kickfire’s product is an appliance that functions as a MySQL storage engine.
2. There’s a custom chip involved.
3. Kickfire plans to throw around the “stream processing” buzzphrase a lot.
Now, “stream processing” means a lot of different things to different people. E.g., Netezza uses the phrase just because their FPGA throws away a lot of data before ever routing it to more conventional SQL processing. But pending a briefing, I’m guessing that Kickfire’s sense is similar to what underlies the case for using CEP in BI.
Edit: Here’s an update after an actual Kickfire briefing.
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7 Responses to “Kickfire is de-cloaking”
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So let me be perfectly clear. In no way do I get paid by Kickfire. Not one bit. Not for a blog posting on Diamond Notes, not for anything.
In addition to my blog I happen to be the editor of MySQL Magazine (http://www.mysqlzine.net). Because of this I have to be very careful about anything I say in print. Funny thing, people remember what you say. It also would not look very good at all if I got paid by a company to write an article about a product. People would very quickly not believe anything I write. In addition to the aforementioned blog posting (and some others I have yet to write) I have a full-length article for the magazine written. So just to be clear…I didn’t get paid to write any of it. I am not getting paid by Kickfire for consulting, reviewing whatever.
Yes, I have been very positive about their product. I have also spent a long time talking to their upper-level people assessing what they are doing. Yes, it is still a product in testing. I think that has been very clearly stated in anything I or the other evaluators have written.
Tomorrow I will be looking at the product and working with it hands-on. Actually there will be a group of us there. You know, all the ones on the Kickfire payroll.
I am sure we will be all reporting what we see. And I guarantee you without a doubt that we will give our opinions about it when we get done.
[…] next trip tomorrow morning. I will be heading to Santa Clara/San Jose for a meeting (you know .. put on by the company some people thinks are paying me ) with Kickfire to take a long look at the MySQL data warehousing product they are bringing to […]
Keith,
Thanks for the clarifications.
I took “involved with” under NDA to mean “paid by”. My error.
CAM
By the way, Keith, it says in http://mysqldatabaseadministration.blogspot.com/2008/04/kickfire-looking-to-push-mysql-limits.html that you were consulting to the company for months.
Why did you only choose to correct the error over here?
Or is “consulting” something one does for free in the MySQL community?
Best,
CAM
[…] Monash has some more information about Kickfire in his post “Kickfire is de-cloaking“. He […]
While we have been talking to Kickfire for quite some time (I have been talking to them since November or December) we were not getting paid. Consulting was probably a bad choice of words on Frank’s part as it does have implications of pay.
[…] us, and hence so are MySQL-related product announcements, including storage engines. One such is Kickfire. ScaleDB — smaller and earlier-stage — is […]