Kickfire
Analysis of MySQL-based data warehouse appliance vendor Kickfire (formerly C2). Related subjects include:
Draft slides on how to select an analytic DBMS
I need to finalize an already-too-long slide deck on how to select an analytic DBMS by late Thursday night. Anybody see something I’m overlooking, or just plain got wrong?
Edit: The slides have now been finalized.
Kickfire reports a few customer wins
Kickfire has the kind of blog I emphatically advise my clients to publish even when they don’t have management bandwidth to do something “sexier.” If nothing else, at least they record their customer wins when they can.
The current list of cited customers is two application appliance OEM vendors (unnamed, but with some detail), plus one Web 2.0 company (ditto). They’ve also posted about a Sun partnership.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share and customer counts | 1 Comment |
Introduction to Kickfire
I’ve spent a few hours visiting or otherwise talking with my new clients at Kickfire recently, so I think I have a better feel for their story. A few details are still missing, however, either because I didn’t get around to asking about them, or because an unexplained accident corrupted my notes (and I wasn’t even using Office 2007). Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, MySQL, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
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.
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.