Kickfire has announced (as of April 14th, 2008) record breaking results in the TPC-H(tm) Price/Performance category at 300GB and also in overall performance in the non-clustered category at 300GB.
You can find the official results here on the TPC(tm) (Transaction Processing Performance Council) website:
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster

While the amazingly low price of the Kickfire Database Appliance 2400 will grab you (only about twice the price of a typical 4U MySQL database server) -- the amazing performance per watt is truly incredible. The 3RU Kickfire appliance used in the 300GB volume test consumes just 3RU of rack space and a measly 650watts of power.

To give an appropriate comparison, my home gaming PC contains an 800W power supply. Compared to other high performance database systems (comparison by wattage, not necessarily performance) that use tens (even hundreds) of thousands of watts, the Kickfire appliance is orders of magnitude more environmentally friendly.

Not only does it reduce the amount of physical space required, but it also reduces the costs of environmental control (cooling). It uses less manufacturing resources, is more portable between data centers and it requires less excess inventory (like spare hard disks) to maintain, all of which result in significant cost of maintenance savings.

This 'green' aspect is one of the major factors in my decision to join Kickfire, and I'm proud to be working for a company making such huge strides toward sustainable computing practices.

Full disclosure: I am a paid employee of Kickfire, Inc. The opinions expressed in my personal blog posts are my own and may not reflect those of the company. All facts and figures may be validated via the TPC website, and this blog does not represent an official posting of TPC-H data, or any other TPC related information.

Kickfire is a trademark of Kickfire, Inc.
TPCH, QphH and $/QphH are trademarks of the TPC. For additional information on the TPCH benchmark, please visit the Transaction Processing Performance Council's Web site at http://www.tpc.org/.

I had a chance to visit the Kickfire booth after the keynotes and before the first presentation. They gave me a kicking t-shirt, followed by a presentation on the newly announced Kickfire appliance (now in beta, shipping in Fall 2008). Here are some notes I jotted down:

• von Neumann bottleneck
• SQL chip (SQC), packs the power of 10s of conventional CPUs
• Query parallelization on the chip
• On-chip memory - 64GB. No registers - no von Neumann bottleneck
• Beats the performance of a given 3 server, 32 CPU, 130TB box (1TB of actual data - space is used for distributing IO)
• SQC uses column-store, compression, intelligent indexing
• SQL Chip, PCI connection, plugs into a Linux server
  • SQL execution
  • Memory management
  • Loader acceleration
• KDB (Kickfire storage engine), plugs into MySQL
• Optimizer
• Transactional engine
• Column store & cache
• Kickfire appliance size is 2U or 3U
• Highest performing MySQL related database offering
• Starts at $20k (10x performance of similar priced offerings)
• Point and go, point the appliance at the existing db and it sucks the data in
• Up to 3TB database
• Percona ran a test of some Dell box with MySQL vs Kickfire Appliance and Kickfire is 1000x faster

So my questions are:

• does it support foreign keys? The presenter answered yes.
• how does it handle replication?

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