The Kickfire appliance is designed for business intelligence and analytical workloads, as opposed to OLTP (online transaction processing) environments. Most of the focus in the MySQL area right now revolves around increasing performance for OLTP type workloads, which makes sense as this is the traditional workload that MySQL has been used for. In contrast, Kickfire focuses squarely on analytic environments, delivering high performance execution of analytical and reporting queries .
A MySQL server with fast processors, fast disks (or ssd) and lot of memory will answer many OLTP queries easily. Kickfire will outperform such a server for typical analytical queries such as aggregation over a large number of rows.
A typical OLTP query might ask “What is the shipping address for this invoice?”. Contrast this with a typical analytical query, which asks “How much of this item did we sell in all of …
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