Kickfire
Kickfire, Inc. is an analytic database appliance manufacturer. The Kickfire appliance utilizes FPGA hardware acceleration techniques for SQL databases.
Features:
- column store, which increases performance of sequential record access at the expense of common transactional operations such as single record retrieval, updates, and deletes.
- MySQL integrated as a storage engine plugin, with special modifications to the optimizer to allow query rewrite optimizations over a column store.
- An FPGA-based "Query Processor Module" which attaches via external PCI-X bus to a base server module, a linux server. The QPM features a dataflow architecture and implements relational algebra in run time reconfigurable hardware for SQL join execution.
- Compression, which reduces I/O bandwidth requirements. High compression is possible because columns of homogeneous datatype are stored together and because updates to the main store are batched.
The base server module ("BSM") runs on CentOS. The QPM integrates with the BSM via Kickfire software. Kickfire breaks SQL statements into hardware "tasks" which can be executed in parallel on the specialized hardware resulting in substantial performance improvement on certain types of SQL queries, such as the TPC-H(tm) benchmark.
Kickfire was founded in 2006 by CTO Joseph Chamdani and company president Raj Cherabuddi. Bruce Armstrong became CEO in November 2008.
See also
- Column-oriented database