Wednesday
Aug042010
R.I.P. Kickfire
Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 11:00PM
If the news/rumor mill is correct than Kickfire may be down for the count. The website for Kickfire is http://www.kickfire.com but it appears to be down. I spent some time with the Kickfire time several years ago when they were first getting ramped up and I have always thought the core idea was sound. The center of Kickfire's technology was a card that supplied hardware acceleration for SQL queries. It's a phenomenal idea in my opinion. In practice it could provide for some incredible query acceleration.
I don't know enough of the situation to speculate on why Kickfire seems to have failed. I haven't spoken to anyone from Kickfire in almost a year, if not more. Some have speculated it was because the product was built on MySQL. I don't believe that. The market that Kickfire was targeting was not the same as those who download either the community or enterprise version of MySQL. If you think otherwise you don't understand the Kickfire product.
If the rumors/news are true I am saddened for the people who worked there who believed in what they were doing and have been let down. It doesn't matter if it was a problem with what the product was built upon, failures of executive leadership, or a matter of timing with the poor economy over last few years. I would think it was much more of the economy than anything else. Regardless of the reasons a once promising technology is now dead. People are out looking for work when times aren't at their best.
I truly hope someone picks up the idea down the road. Remember the old non-accelerated graphics cards from 15 year ago when Windows 95 was all the rage? Rememberhow slow they ran? Now think about a the nice modern Nvidia or ATI GPUs that are powering your Windows 7 desktop now. The difference in power is simply astounding. The promise of Kickfire was that it could bring the same power as those GPUs to your database server.
It might be another 10 years or more before someone can create a true general purpose SQL accelerator card. One that doesn't require specialized knowledge to work with. You don't have to tweak your operating system to truly utilize your graphics card. You just load the appropriate drive (or the operating system loads it during installation) and the GPU is used to its potential. As a DBA I don't want to learn new programming or new query optimization techniques to use a new piece of hardware. I want to plug it in and benefit from it.
Just my two cents.
keith
I don't know enough of the situation to speculate on why Kickfire seems to have failed. I haven't spoken to anyone from Kickfire in almost a year, if not more. Some have speculated it was because the product was built on MySQL. I don't believe that. The market that Kickfire was targeting was not the same as those who download either the community or enterprise version of MySQL. If you think otherwise you don't understand the Kickfire product.
If the rumors/news are true I am saddened for the people who worked there who believed in what they were doing and have been let down. It doesn't matter if it was a problem with what the product was built upon, failures of executive leadership, or a matter of timing with the poor economy over last few years. I would think it was much more of the economy than anything else. Regardless of the reasons a once promising technology is now dead. People are out looking for work when times aren't at their best.
I truly hope someone picks up the idea down the road. Remember the old non-accelerated graphics cards from 15 year ago when Windows 95 was all the rage? Rememberhow slow they ran? Now think about a the nice modern Nvidia or ATI GPUs that are powering your Windows 7 desktop now. The difference in power is simply astounding. The promise of Kickfire was that it could bring the same power as those GPUs to your database server.
It might be another 10 years or more before someone can create a true general purpose SQL accelerator card. One that doesn't require specialized knowledge to work with. You don't have to tweak your operating system to truly utilize your graphics card. You just load the appropriate drive (or the operating system loads it during installation) and the GPU is used to its potential. As a DBA I don't want to learn new programming or new query optimization techniques to use a new piece of hardware. I want to plug it in and benefit from it.
Just my two cents.
keith
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