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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>Comparing, say, Kx systems Q/KDB (80s technology which still sells for upwards of $100k a CPU, and is worth every penny) to Hive or Reddis is an exercise in high comedy. Q does what Hive does. It does what Reddis does. It does both, several other impressive things modern “big data” types haven’t thought of yet, and it does them better, using only a few pages of tight C code, and a few more pages of tight K code.

it is exactly exercise in comedy. Hive and Reddis are free. They do for regular persons and tasks what only $100K/CPU systems of yesterday were doing. It is like comparing high-professional $100K film cameras of yesterday with today's consumer 5-10M cameras. A $100K thing which i would never had access to vs. real cheap/free gigantic expansion of my capabilities. The choice is obvious to me.

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There is a difference. The new cameras are based on more advanced tech. The new storage machines are not necessarily based on new ideas in algorithmic execution.

I'm not sure I agree, but the assertion of the article is that much of today's pain is a refusal to acknowledge the progress of the past.

For myself, there is a lot to this. Many of my peers and the younger crowd are convinced that the problems they are solving have never been considered in the past. To the point that some of my coworkers are proud that they are "weak" in algorithms.

It's a strawman because nobody is trying to sell you anything, especially a commodity. Their market are people dropping loads of money on datamining hardware and personnel with an aim to get the most analytical value for their money. Then they find out about this excellent database that blows the competition away in capabilities and efficiency. Spending a little extra on this maximizes ROI on their hardware.

And so many companies do. Others continue working with crap like Hive and Reddis where they spend more time & money on supporting the software than getting analysis done.

KDB is nothing like Hive or redis. In fact, there is no prominent open source project comparable to KDB in terms of architecture or use case.

KDB is a fast column oriented database with an APL-like API. Hive is a SQL translation layer for MapReduce/Tez and Redis is a key-value store with rich data structures.

KDB is actually free nowadays if you can live with the 32bit limitation.

Banks have moved to linux from paid o/s yet they continue to shell out for KDB (and the dev are not cheap either).

Why did they move a whole o/s platform but not from kdb?

I assume to keep licensing current to support legacy code. I would be surprised if much revenue comes from new installs

KDB is the tool of choice on new projects. Also, $12.5k a core these days (last I checked).

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