Kickfire MySQL Appliance
From Big Database List
 | |
| Vendor | Kickfire |
|---|---|
| Website | http://www.kickfire.com/content/view/7/8/ |
Kickfire analytic appliances bring together hardware and software innovations that deliver high-performance database queries for MySQL data warehousing without any trade offs. By combining the ease of use of MySQL with patented hardware and state-of-the-art software technology, Kickfire is able to deliver high-end performance without the expense and complexity of other solutions.
Kickfire's uses MySQL as the base, because this gives its customers the ability to easily migrate to Kickfire but replace MySQL's storage engine with their own column store engine. Under the covers, the column store structures data based on the columns in a table, rather than the traditional method based on rows in a table. This structure has been found to achieve better compression and better ad-hoc query performance because only the columns being queried -- not all of the rows -- need to be scanned.
Kickfire goes further by adding a proprietary "SQL Chip" co-processor to further enhance its product's performance. Kickfire has replaced the MySQL query optimizer (the component that takes an SQL statement and splits it into a series of operators for processing) to produce operators that can be sent directly to its SQL Chip for processing. So, rather than running these operators on a general-purpose CPU, which has to convert them into a series of regular CPU instructions and then muck around loading the data into registers from memory, the optimizer instead sends them to the SQL Chip, which natively understands them and processes them on data streamed directly from memory.
