Kickfire kicks off
I chatted with Raj Cherabuddi and others on the Kickfire (formerly C2) team for over an hour on Monday, and now have a better sense of their story. There are some very basic questions I still don’t have answers to; I’ll fill those in when I can.
Highlights of what I have and haven’t figured out so far include:
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Kickfire’s technology has two main parts: A SQL co-processor chip and a MySQL storage engine.
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Kickfire makes a Type 0 appliance. If I understood correctly, it contains the chip, a couple of standard CPU cores, and 64 gigs of RAM. Or else it contains just the chip, and is meant to be hooked up to a 2U box with 64 gigs of RAM. I’m confused.
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The Kickfire box can handle up to 3 terabytes of user data. The disk required for that is 4-5 terabytes without redundancy, 2X with. Based on that formulation and other clues, I’m guessing Kickfire — unlike other appliance vendors — doesn’t build in storage itself.
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I don’t know whether the Kickfire chip is true custom silicon or an FPGA emulation.
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The essential idea of the chip is dataflow programming for SQL, with pipelining between operations. This eliminates the overhead of registers and context switching. I don’t know what the trade-offs are, if any.
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Kickfire’s database software is columnar, operating on compressed data even in RAM. In that, Kickfire’s story is most similar to Vertica’s, although I’m guessing Exasol may do something similar as well. Like Vertica, Kickfire uses multiple compression methods (they’re reluctant to give detail, but agreed it would be fair to say they use both something like dictionary/token and something like delta compression).
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Kickfire’s software is ACID-compliant. You can do incremental loads or trickle feeds. Bulk load speed is 100 Gb/hour. Kickfire’s solution for the traditional problem of updating column stores is called “snapshots.” Without giving details, they position that as similar to the Vertica solution.
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Like other MySQL storage engines, Kickfire inherits whatever data connectivity, stored procedure capabilities, user-defined functions ability, etc. that MySQL has.
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Kickfire has no paying customers, but does have a slide showing many logos of “prospects and beta customers.”
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Kickfire has no MPP capabilities at this time, but says adding those is “on the roadmap” and will be “easy.”
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Kickfire submitted a 100 Gb TPC-H result, in which it beat the previous leaders — Exasol, ParAccel, and Microsoft – on price-performance, and lagged only Exasol and ParAccel on absolute performance. Kickfire is extremely proud of this. Indeed, I don’t recall another vendor ascribing that much weight to them in the entire history of TPCs.* Kickfire seems unfazed by the fact that its result is for a system listed with a ship date 6 months in the future (I’m guessing that’s the latest the TPC will allow), while the other results are for systems available today.
*Somebody – perhaps adman extraordinaire Rick Bennett? — may want to check my memory on this, but I think Oracle’s famed “Gentlemen, start your snails” ad in the early 1990s was about PC World tests, not TPCs. Oracle also had an ad about WW1-style planes nosediving, but I don’t think those referenced TPCs either.
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8 Responses to “Kickfire kicks off”
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I’m not sure I see why it makes a big difference whether the chip is custom silicon or an FGPA. Or whether it’s three chips or one chip or four chips. The real question is how much it costs and how well it performs. People have been trying to come up with special hardware accelerators for database systems and file systems for quite a long time. So far it doesn’t seem to have yielded big results in the marketplace, but past results are not a good predictor of future performance: maybe they’ve really got a winning technology here. The TPC-H result perhaps is something they’re making a big fuss about because it’s the main, or only, way they can demonstrate good price-performance.
And, of course, real customer testimonials are nice. Their list of VC’s is impressive and their management has good credentials. This looks worth keeping an eye on!
Thanks for the post Curt. Here are the clarifications you are looking for on some of the implementation and packaging details. I know we covered a lot in the one hour briefing.
The Kickfire Database Appliance is an out of the box appliance that includes the commodity CPU hardware, disk and Linux + MySQL 5.1 and the Kickfire storage engine software + our SQL Chip. It is 2 RU and larger versions are 3 RU.
Each appliance contains what we call the Base Server Module (which runs Linux and MySQL): This has Dual Quad-Core Xeon CPUs and 16 GB RAM. This is connected via a PCI cable to our Query Processing Module which contains the SQL Chip and various amounts of RAM depending on the model (up to 256GB today). Remember also, that Kickfire both compresses data and operates on compressed data (not something that all appliances and analytic databases do). So what is actually in memory is effectively much more user data. And because of the architecture, our chip operates on data in memory without the bottleneck of registers (you mentioned this above).
Storage is included with the appliance as well (8x either 37GB, 73GB or 146GB SAS drives). You also can connect your own external storage to Kickfire (not something all appliances support.)
Also, we want to be clear about our announcement and emphasis on TPC-H. This is very exciting technology with disruptive implications on the costs of database query processing. With Kickfire and MySQL, open source data warehousing class performance is now possible in a load-and-go appliance. We just announced the Beta version of our appliance is now available. The TPC-H results were done to demonstrate the power we bring in a small, cost-effective package. Our announcement was done to get the word out to attract innovative clients to our Beta program. General availability is not that far away. We are quite busy.
We will stay in touch with you Curt. Thanks.
Hi Steve,
Should I assume box manufacture is outsourced to one of the (probably Asian) usual suspects, the exact identity of whom is undisclosed?
As for the TPCs, I suspect that chip/hardware guys get more excited about benchmarks than dyed-in-the-wool software guys do. 🙂 But seriously, a 2X price/performance improvement over the runner-up alternative isn’t obviously “disruptive”. What’s disruptive is the data warehouse specialist vendors as a group radically outperforming the general-purpose ones.
Best,
CAM
You wrote:
“*Somebody – perhaps adman extraordinaire Rick Bennett? — may want to check my memory on this, but I think Oracle’s famed “Gentlemen, start your snails” ad in the early 1990s was about PC World tests, not TPCs. Oracle also had an ad about WW1-style planes nosediving, but I don’t think those referenced TPCs either.”
I remember meeting Rick Bennett at his home-based office on the Peninsula when he was working on those WW1-plane ads. I’m pretty sure they were TPCs.
-RAD
Thanks, Robert.
I should email Rick and nudge him to answer us directly. 🙂
Best,
CAM
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