Kickfire is targeting MySQL database shops at the lower end of the data warehousing market. Armed with a new appliance, the company says it can dramatically increase data loading and query speeds for MySQL data warehouses.To hear officials at Kickfire tell it, MySQL shops are hurting when it comes
to data warehousing.
"Customers will tell you that they really run out of gas at 50GB, which
is really quite tiny," said Kickfire CEO
Bruce Armstrong.
It's there, he said, that Kickfire believes it has found a sweet spot.
Roughly a year after talking
up its SQL chip at MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, the company is
officially launching Kickfire MySQL Appliance Release 1.1 with an eye
toward the lower end of the data warehousing market.
"Ninety percent of the customer deployments are less than 10TB, and
it's the fastest area of growth," Armstrong said. "We're going after
MySQL shops that are in pain."
There is no shortage of players in the data
warehousing market, from vendors such as Teradata and Sybase to companies
such as Greenplum. By targeting MySQL shops specifically, however, Kickfire aims
to find a niche for itself.
At the core of the
Kickfire appliance (PDF) is a SQL chip that allows for massively parallel
processing and a column-store engine with full ACID compliance designed to
break the input/output bottleneck. Officials at Mamasource, an online community
with some 2 million members, reported that the company was able to
significantly speed data loading over standard MySQL and dispense with the
slower query times and endless tuning that had been a reality for the growing
site.
"Our database is 300GB and growing by 1GB a day," Justin Lin, vice
president of products at Mamasource, said in a statement. "We have to get
it to scale to billions of records and with Kickfire I can finally see how we
will do it."
The Kickfire appliance runs standard MySQL Enterprise. Featuring a
plug-and-play design, the appliance is integrated and optimized down to the
operating system level with features such as Active System Monitor, which
notifies users of potential system anomalies.
"We really have invested a lot of our R&D dollars in making it
truly plug-and-play," Armstrong explained. "[We have] the ability to
install it in a standard rack and be able to use our MySQL migration wizard to
point to a MySQL database and copy the schema, the data, any constraints, any
indexes then move that data over to Kickfire and in the background
automatically index the data."
The appliance supports 100 concurrent users and 1,000
active users and is available now at a price of $32,000.