Today is my first official day with Kickfire. I've spent most of the day reading up about how the appliance works and trying to wrap my head around some of the finer details.

My starting role here is essentially as an internal consultant, which means that I'll be the one that gets the MySQL server related questions from the development team. This is going to allow me a chance to really sink my teeth further into the source code and help implement some really cool tech, which has me quite excited.

Later I will be doing some external consulting (sales, implementation, etc) that will allow me to travel a bit.

Overall, I think this position is a great fit for me and I'm really psyched.

My name is Karl Van den Bergh — I do Business Development here at Kickfire. I’ll be joining Raj on our corporate blog adding my comments to what is happening at our company and in our marketplace.

What a great conference (my first) and what a great venue it was to have launched our company and beta product.

Now that I have switched from the dark side of commercial software to the open source world, my eyes have been opened to the power of the community. Specifically, the success of our launch can, to a large degree, be attributed to the community.

Over the last couple of weeks I have heard comments in the blogosphere to the effect that Kickfire has a great marketing machine. One blog noted that Kickfire had “brought Web 2.0 Marketing to the Database World.” Whereas our marketing team will certainly take pride in these comments (and should for all the hard work that went into this launch), the reality is that our …

I had a chance to visit the Kickfire booth after the keynotes and before the first presentation. They gave me a kicking t-shirt, followed by a presentation on the newly announced Kickfire appliance (now in beta, shipping in Fall 2008). Here are some notes I jotted down:

• von Neumann bottleneck
• SQL chip (SQC), packs the power of 10s of conventional CPUs
• Query parallelization on the chip
• On-chip memory - 64GB. No registers - no von Neumann bottleneck
• Beats the performance of a given 3 server, 32 CPU, 130TB box (1TB of actual data - space is used for distributing IO)
• SQC uses column-store, compression, intelligent indexing
• SQL Chip, PCI connection, plugs into a Linux server
  • SQL execution
  • Memory management
  • Loader acceleration
• KDB (Kickfire storage engine), plugs into MySQL …

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial list.)

• SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the GNU operating system for what it is!
• MySQL Enterprise’s flyer has three big bullet points: MySQL Load Balancer, MySQL Connection Manager, and MySQL Enterprise Monitor Query Analyzer. The first two look like they’re probably built on MySQL Proxy. The last has a visual explain plan feature, which according to an elevator conversation is not yet built. I’ll stop by their booth and see. As you may know, Maatkit has provided a tool (which is designed for integration into other tools) …

The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well.

Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there is also a new member of the certified engines program.

Kickfire has recently …

Today, we officially launched Kickfire. As part of our announcement we published, together with Sun Microsystems, record-breaking TPC-H benchmark numbers (data warehousing industry benchmarks) as well as a series of significant partnerships in the Open Source world.

There has been a lot of work here over the last two years to get us to this point and I am very proud of the team for getting us to where we are today. Two years ago we just had a vision; today that vision became reality – one substantiated by independent industry benchmarks.

For those of you unfamiliar with these benchmarks let me give you a brief overview to explain why we …

I spent the day Thursday with some of Kickfire’s engineers at their headquarters. In this article, I’d like to go over a little of the system’s architecture and some other details.

Everything in quotation marks in this article is a quote. (I don’t use quotes when I’m glossing over a technical point — at least, not in this article.)

Even though I saw one of Kickfire’s engineers running queries on the system, they didn’t let me actually take the keyboard and type into it myself. So everything I’m writing here is still second-hand knowledge. It’s an unreleased product that’s in very rapid development, so this is understandable.

Kickfire’s TPC-H benchmarks are now published, so you can see the results of what I’ve been seeing them work on. They …

Just a quick note: Kickfire is not based on SSD (solid-state device) hard drives. Their old website says “SQL goes solid state” but that just means SQL in hardware, not SSD.

When I was a child, we had a Sears Lady Kenmore clothes washing machine that boasted “solid-state circuits” on the panel, in flowery script writing. It was not based on SSD, either.

Finally, I am not on the Kickfire payroll. I’m not getting anything from working with them, except perhaps the fun of being in their labs while they’re still in stealth mode. It’s a harder balance than you might think, writing about a product that I don’t know about and am excited to learn about, and sounding objective. If I’m sounding like a fanboy, I don’t mean to. Trust me, if it’s vaporware you’ll hear it here first.

…

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is obviously my clear focus, actually now working for PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a …

Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo. Like Keith Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This article explains the basics of how their technology is different from the current state of the art in complex queries on large amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip. On the surface, the storage engine is not that revolutionary: it is a column-store engine with data compression and some other techniques to reduce disk I/O, which is kind of par for the course in data warehousing today. The chip is the really exciting part of the technology.

The simplest description of their chip is that it …