The future of kdb+?
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The future of kdb+?
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Re: The future of kdb+?
#2A few corrections to the article.
1. ClickHouse is not a new technology — it has been open-source since 2016 and in development since 2009.
2. ClickHouse can do all three use cases: historical and real-time data, distributed and local processing (check clickhouse-local and chdb).
3. ClickHouse was the first SQL database with ASOF JOIN in the main product (in 2019) - after kdb+, which is not SQL.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#3There are certainly enough rubes out there to sell the next KDB+ to: https://shakti.com/
Re: The future of kdb+?
#4One of the compelling features of kdb+/Q that isn't explicitly called out here is vertical integration: it's a single piece of technology that can handle the use-cases of a whole stack of other off-the-shelf technologies you'd otherwise need to select and glue together. The Q language, data serialization primitives, and IPC capabilities allow a skilled programmer to tailor-build exactly the system you need in one language, often in a codebase that would fit on a few sheets of paper instead of a few hundred or thousand.
If your organization has already committed to serving some of these roles with other pieces of software, protocols, or formats, the benefits of vertical integration- both in development workflow and overall performance- are diminished. When kdb+ itself is both proprietary and expensive it is understandably difficult to justify a total commitment to it for new projects. It's a real shame, because the tech itself is a jewel.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#5Kdb+ seems really cool and I've learned it a little bit for fun along with APL. It would actually be pretty cool for a lot of uses in my industry too, but the price is just crazy. We can't pay like $100k/cpu or whatever it is that the financial banks pay. So they've basically ignored a HUGE amount of potential customers.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#6A few corrections to the article. 1. ClickHouse is not a new technology — it has been open-source since 2016 and in development since 2009. 2. ClickHouse can do all three use cases: historical and real-time data, distributed and local processing (check clickhouse-local and chdb). 3. ClickHouse was the first SQL database with ASOF JOIN in the main product (in 2019) - after kdb+, which is not SQL.
3 is a point that’s lost on people who use Q and related things for financial calculations. They picked kdb+ for a reason, and it wasn’t the database. I took that as the point of the post.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#7 Get a free version out there that can be used for many things…
Having used kdb+ extensively in the finance world for years, I became a convert and a fan. There’s an elegance in its design and simplicity that seems very much rooted in the Unix philosophy. After I left finance, and no longer worked at a company that used kdb+, I often felt the urge to reach for kdb+ to use for little projects here and there. It was frustrating that I couldn’t use it anymore, or even just show colleagues this little known/niche tool and geek out a little on how simple and efficient it was for doing certain tasks/computations.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#8It is an old product that is no longer relevant, and there is no longer any demand for it. Time to move on.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#9Kdb+ seems really cool and I've learned it a little bit for fun along with APL. It would actually be pretty cool for a lot of uses in my industry too, but the price is just crazy. We can't pay like $100k/cpu or whatever it is that the financial banks pay. So they've basically ignored a HUGE amount of potential customers.
They found a niche that can pay the price to have an innovative product. I believe they did the right thing, after all it is not a product trying to solve all problems in the world. Other people could learn from their techniques and do the same for other areas and languages.
Re: The future of kdb+?
#10It is an old product that is no longer relevant, and there is no longer any demand for it. Time to move on.
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