Kickfire
Encyclopedia
Kickfire, Inc. was an analytic database
appliance
manufacturer. It was acquired by Teradata
in August 2010. The Kickfire appliance utilizes FPGA hardware acceleration techniques for SQL databases.
Features:
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.
In August 2010, Kickfire was acquired by the data warehousing company, Teradata
.
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
appliance
Appliance
Appliance may refer to:* Home appliance, household machines, using electricity or some other energy input** Small appliances** Major appliances...
manufacturer. It was acquired by Teradata
Teradata
Teradata Corporation is a vendor specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications. Its products are commonly used by companies to manage data warehouses for analytics and business intelligence purposes. Teradata was formerly a division of NCR Corporation, with the spinoff from NCR on...
in August 2010. 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 plug-in, 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 linux server module. The QPM features a dataflowDataflowDataflow is a term used in computing, and may have various shades of meaning. It is closely related to message passing.-Software architecture:...
architecture and implements relational algebra in run time reconfigurable hardware for SQL join execution. - CompressionData compressionIn computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....
, 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
CentOS
CentOS is a free operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux . It exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution...
. 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.
In August 2010, Kickfire was acquired by the data warehousing company, Teradata
Teradata
Teradata Corporation is a vendor specializing in data warehousing and analytic applications. Its products are commonly used by companies to manage data warehouses for analytics and business intelligence purposes. Teradata was formerly a division of NCR Corporation, with the spinoff from NCR on...
.