Kickfire

Analysis of MySQL-based data warehouse appliance vendor Kickfire (formerly C2). Related subjects include:

February 4, 2009

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.

January 12, 2009

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.

October 22, 2008

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

April 18, 2008

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:

*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.

April 8, 2008

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.

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