Kickfire
Analysis of MySQL-based data warehouse appliance vendor Kickfire (formerly C2). Related subjects include:
XtremeData update
I talked with Geno Valente of XtremeData tonight. Highlights included:
- XtremeData still hasn’t sold any dbX stuff (they’ve had a side business in generic FPGA-based boards paying the bills for years). Well, there may have been some paid POCs (proofs of concept) or something, but real sales haven’t come through yet.
- XtremeData does have three prospects who have said “Yes”, and expects one order to come through this month.
- XtremeData continues to believe it shines when:
- Data models are complex
- In particular, there are complex joins
- In particular, two large tables have to be joined with each other, under circumstances where no product can avoid doing vast data redistribution
- XtremeData insists that all the nice things Bill Inmon – including in webinars — has said about it has not been for pay or other similar business compensation. That’s quite unusual.
- XtremeData is coming out with a new product, codenamed the Personal Data Warehouse (PDW), which:
- Is ready to go into beta test
- Should be launched in a month and a half or so
- Will have a different name when it is launched
Naming aside, Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Kickfire, Market share, Netezza, Pricing, XtremeData | Leave a Comment |
Comments on a fabricated press release quote
My clients at Kickfire put out a press release last week quoting me as saying things I neither said nor believe. The press release is about a “Queen For A Day” kind of contest announced way back in April, in which users were invited to submit stories of their data warehouse problems, with the biggest sob stories winning free Kickfire appliances. The fabricated “quote” reads: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share, Sybase | 2 Comments |
Reports of perfectly-balanced hardware configurations are greatly exaggerated
Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they’ve worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes:
- Teradata ascribes considerable importance to a Virtual Storage technology whose main purpose is to allow mixing of heterogeneous storage devices in a single system. And the discussion rarely suggests that these parts will be in a rigid fixed relationship.
- Netezza — as Teradata keeps reminding me — often sells boxes with the expectation that they won’t be filled with data, so as to increase spindle count and hence performance.
- Oracle/Sun have dropped some comments about Exadata being more flexibly configured going forward.
- Kickfire’s new “high-end” appliance lets you attach fairly arbitrary amounts of external storage.
- And of course, software-only analytic DBMS vendors run their software in all sorts of hardware and storage environments.
What’s more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse’s workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the “ideal” hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user’s “ideal” configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be “ideally balanced” for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Kickfire, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata | 6 Comments |
Kickfire capacity and pricing
Kickfire’s marketing communication efforts are still a work in progress. Kickfire did finally relax its secrecy about FPGA-vs.-custom-silicon – not coincidentally during Netezza’s recent publicity cycle. That wise choice helped Kickfire get some favorable attention recently for its technical and market strategy, e.g. from Daniel Abadi, Merv Adrian and, kicking things off — as it were — me. Weeks after a recent Kickfire product release, there’s finally a fairly accurate data sheet up, although there’s still one self-defeatingly misleading line I’ll comment on below. Pricing is a whole other area of confusion, although it seems that current list prices have been inadvertently* leaked in Merv’s post linked above, with only one inaccuracy that I can detect.**
*I gather from the company that they forgot to tell Merv pricing was NDA.
** Merv cited a price as “starting” that I believe to be top-of-the-line. No criticism of Merv is implied in that; Kickfire has not been very clear in communicating hard numbers.
All that said, if one takes Kickfire’s marketing statements literally, Kickfire list pricing is around $20-50K per terabyte for a few small, fixed, high-performance configurations. That’s all-in, for plug-and-play appliances. What’s more, that range is based on the actual published user data capacity numbers for various Kickfire models, which I think are low for several reasons:
- Kickfire doesn’t officially admit that its model with 14.4 terabytes of disk can manage more than 6 terabytes of data, even though it clearly can.
- Actually, those 14.4 terabytes of disk can be increased or lowered as you choose.
- The basic compression figures implied in those calculations seem conservative.
- Compression figures are a lot more conservative yet, in that Kickfire assumes you’ll have a lot of actual indexes on your data. I’m not sure that’s necessary for most workloads.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Kickfire, Pricing | 3 Comments |
Infobright notes
I had lunch w/ Bob Zurek and Susan Davis of Infobright today. This wasn’t primarily a briefing, but a few takeaways are:
- Infobright now has >100 paying customers.
- Typical database size is from the low 100s of gigabytes to the low single-digit number of terabytes.
- Agile development is at or approaching two-week release cycles.
- Like Kickfire, Infobright has a multi-year deal with MySQL that insulates it against many potential Oracle/MySQL shenanigans.
- From an industry perspective, Infobright’s customer base sounds a lot like other vendors’:
- Data mart outsourcing/online analytics
- Log files for websites
- Telecommunications
- Financial services
- OEM, especially in the markets cited above
- “Hey, we’re beginning to see the occasional energy deal”
- A few random others
- Infobright is seeing some household-name customers, who surely have big-name analytic DBMS products, but who also have a policy that open source is the default choice, and if open source can get the job done then the favorite closed-source choices aren’t used.
- Infobright has the usual open-source community story — lots of involvement and engagement in the forums, but contributions are limited mainly to connectivity, utility scripts, etc. (Maybe some national language translation too; I’m not sure.)
Kickfire’s FPGA-based technical strategy
Kickfire’s basic value proposition is that, if you have a data warehouse in the 100s of gigabytes, they’ll sell you – for $32,000 – a tiny box that solves all your query performance problems, as per the Kickfire spec sheet. And Kickfire backs that up with a pretty cool product design. However, thanks in no small part to what was heretofore Kickfire’s penchant for self-defeating secrecy, the Kickfire story is not widely appreciated.
Fortunately, Kickfire is getting over its secrecy kick. And so, here are some Kickfire technical basics.
- Kickfire is MySQL-based, with all the SQL functionality and lack of functionality that entails.
- The Kickfire/MySQL DBMS is columnar, with the usual benefits in compression and I/O reduction.
- Kickfire is based on FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays).
- The Kickfire DBMS is ACID-compliant.
- Kickfire runs only as a single-box appliance.
- While Kickfire earlier estimated that, at least for data sets that compressed well, a Kickfire box could hold 3-10 terabytes of user data, more recent figures I’ve heard from Kickfire have been in the 1-1 /2 terabyte range. (Edit: Karl Van Der Bergh subsequently wrote in to say that the 1 1/2 TB is raw disk figure, not user data.)
The new information there is that Kickfire relies on an FPGA; Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Kickfire, MySQL, Theory and architecture | 16 Comments |
“The Netezza price point”
Over the past couple of years, quite a few data warehouse appliance or DBMS vendors have talked to me directly in terms of “Netezza’s price point,” or some similar phrase. Some have indicated that they’re right around the Netezza price point, but think their products are superior to Netezza’s. Others have stressed the large gap between their price and Netezza’s. But one way or the other, “Netezza’s price” has been an industry metric.
One reason everybody talks about the “Netezza (list) price” is that it hasn’t been changing much, seemingly staying stable at $50-60K/terabyte for a long time. And thus Teradata’s 2550 and Oracle’s larger-disk Exadata configuration — both priced more or less in the same range — have clearly been price-competitive with Netezza since their respective introductions.
That just changed. Netezza is cutting its pricing to the $20K/terabyte range imminently, with further cuts to come. So where does that leave competitors?
- The Teradata 1550 is in the Netezza price range (still a little below, actually).
- Oracle basically has nothing price-competitive with Netezza.
- Microsoft has stated it plans to introduce Madison below the old DATAllegro price points; conceivably, that could be competitive with Netezza’s new pricing, although I haven’t checked as to how much it now costs simply to buy a lot of SQL Server licenses (which presumably would be a Madison lower bound, and might except for hardware be the whole thing, since Microsoft likes to create large product bundles).
- XtremeData just launched in the new Netezza price range.
- Troubled Dataupia is hard to judge. While on the surface Dataupia’s prices sound very low, you can’t use a Dataupia box unless you also have a brand-name DBMS (license and hardware) alongside it. That obviously affects total cost significantly.
- Kickfire seems unaffected, as it doesn’t and most likely won’t compete with Netezza (different database size ranges).
- For the most part, software-only vendors are free to adapt or not as they choose. Hardware prices generally don’t need to be over $10K/terabyte, and in some cases could be a lot less. So the question is how far they’re willing to discount their software.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Exadata, Kickfire, Oracle, Pricing, Teradata, XtremeData | 11 Comments |
My current customer list among the analytic DBMS specialists
(This is an updated version of an August, 2008 post.)
One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the analytic/data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Kickfire
- Kognitio
- Microsoft
- Netezza (my biggest client this year, probably, because of all the Enzee Universe appearances)
- Sybase
- Teradata
- Vertica
- Attivio, which may or may not be construed as being in the analytic DBMS business
- Clearpace, ditto
All of those are Monash Advantage members.
If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Infobright, Kickfire, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 4 Comments |
Daniel Abadi on Kickfire and related subjects
Daniel Abadi has a new blog, whose first post centers around Kickfire. The money quote is (emphasis mine):
In order for me to get excited about Kickfire, I have to ignore Mike Stonebraker’s voice in my head telling me that DBMS hardware companies have been launched many times in the past are ALWAYS fail (the main reasoning is that Moore’s law allows for commodity hardware to catch up in performance, eventually making the proprietary hardware overpriced and irrelevant). But given that Moore’s law is transforming into increased parallelism rather than increased raw speed, maybe hardware DBMS companies can succeed now where they have failed in the past
Good point.
More generally, Abadi speculates about the market for MySQL-compatible data warehousing. My responses include:
- OF COURSE there are many MySQL users who need to move to a serious analytic DBMS.
- What’s less clear is whether there’s any big advantage to those users in remaining MySQL-compatible when they do move. I’m not sure what MySQL-specific syntax or optimizations they’d have that would be difficult to port to a non-MySQL system.
- It’s nice to see Abadi speaking well of Infobright and its technology.
- To say that Infobright went open source because it was “desperate” is overstated. That said, I don’t think Infobright was on track to prosper without going open source.
- While open source and MySQL go together, an appliance like Kickfire loses many (not all) of the benefits of open source.
- Calpont has indeed never disclosed a customer win. Any year now … (Just kidding, Vogel!)
- In general, seeing Abadi be so favorable toward Vertica competitors adds credibiity to the recent Hadoop vs. DBMS paper.
Anyhow, as previously noted, I’m a big Daniel Abadi fan. I look forward to seeing what else he posts in his blog, and am optimistic he’ll live up to or exceed its stated goals.
| Categories: Calpont, Columnar database management, DBMS product categories, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Theory and architecture | 2 Comments |
This week is a REALLY good time to actively strengthen the MySQL forkers
As my first three posts on the Oracle/Sun merger suggested, I think Oracle will do a better job with MySQL product development than Sun has. But of course that’s a low hurdle. And so it leaves open the questions:
What should and/or will be the most widely adopted code lines of MySQL (or other open source DBMS),
especially for the types of users and vendors who are engaged with MySQL (as opposed to principal alternative PostgreSQL) today?
As much as I’ve bashed MySQL/MyISAM and MySQL/InnoDB for being low-quality general-purpose DBMS, I’d still hate to see MySQL-based development stall out. There are a number of MySQL engine providers with rather unique technology, that deserve a good front-end partner to build their products with. The high-volume sharding guys deserve the chance to continue down their current path as well. And so does the low-end mass market — although I’m least worried about them, as I can’t imagine any realistic scenario in which Oracle doesn’t offer a version of MySQL fully suited to support 10s of millions of WordPress and Joomla installations.
So far as I can tell, there are only four real and currently active candidates for MySQL code coordinator:
- MySQL itself, soon to be owned by Oracle.
- MariaDB, Monty Widenius’ proposed mainstream MySQL alternative
- Percona, which seems to have some fans as a superior alternative to vendor-supplied MySQL/InnoDB
- Drizzle, which is directly focused at web-centric MySQL users who never wanted a robust DBMS in the first place.
Patrick Galbraith and Steven Vaughan-Nichols did good jobs of illustrating the turmoil.
Oracle isn’t a very comfortable partner long term for the storage engine vendors, and Drizzle doesn’t seem to be what they need. So I think that Infobright, Kickfire, Tokutek, Calpont, et al. need to get aligned in a hurry with an outside MySQL provider such as Percona or MariaDB or a newcomer, preferably all with the same one. Yes, I understand that Infobright is getting a lot of marketing help from Sun these days, that Kickfire just got a nice-sounding Sun marketing announcement as well, and so on. But the time to start working toward the inevitable future is now.
And by “now” I mean “right now,” since the MySQL community is at this moment gathered together for its annual conference.
| Categories: Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source | 12 Comments |