Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: April 17th, 2008

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
  • Optimizer
  • Transactional engine
  • Column store & cache
• Kickfire appliance size is 2U or 3U
• Highest performing MySQL related database offering
• Starts at $20k (10x performance of similar priced offerings)
• Point and go, point the appliance at the existing db and it sucks the data in
• Up to 3TB database
• Percona ran a test of some Dell box with MySQL vs Kickfire Appliance and Kickfire is 1000x faster

So my questions are:

• does it support foreign keys? The presenter answered yes.
• how does it handle replication? The presenter said it should be addressed in the future. Still unclear on this one.

Update 1: In the latest TPC-H results, Kickfire placed at #1, outperforming all competition by a long margin. The cost per QphH (Query-per-Hour) is only 70 cents! The nearest competition is $3+.

Update 2: Kickfire got an incredible amount of attention at this conference, I think it's everything they'd hoped for and a lot more. When some independent respectable benchmarkers, like Peter, actually get their hands on a sample appliance and post some real life tests, we will truly be able to judge on the performance, but if PR was an indicator of anything, Kickfire will have an insanely successful future.