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Kickfire's analytics appliance was noted for its use of MySQL and a special chip for boosting query performance
By Chris Kanaracus | IDG News Service, Aug 10, 2010
Data warehousing vendor Teradata has quietly scooped up Kickfire, a startup analytic appliance vendor known for its use of the open-source MySQL database and a SQL processing chip to boost query performance.
The "tuck-in" deal provides Teradata with "another set of intellectual property that allows us to start looking at things like advanced pipelining," said Darryl McDonald, executive vice president of business development and marketing, during the call. "It's been leveraged all the way from supercomputers all the way down to gaming devices. It really allows you to put super performance of different things into chips and or the software for acceleration and super performance." Data Explosion iGuide
Kickfire's technology has received good marks, but its market strategy was met with some criticism.
"Building a propriety [sic] database stack of hardware and software around a MySQL codebase that attributes much of its success to being open and free is a poor cultural match," wrote Daniel Abadi, an assistant professor of computer science at Yale, in a recent blog post.
Trying to gain a foothold in a crowded market for analytic database systems, Kickfire aimed at customers that had smaller-sized data stores and a desire to analyze that information, but no appetite for the price tags of products from larger vendors.
But Kickfire lacked MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities, which was "a recipe for disaster ... in the 'Big Data Era,'" Abadi said.
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