Keith Murphy and his hard-working crew have released the spring 2008 issue of MySQL Magazine. Go take a look — it includes quite a few articles on various topics, even a mention of our upcoming book (High Performance MySQL, Second Edition).

Keith Murphy, mysql, MySQL Magazine

Today, we officially launched Kickfire. As part of our announcement we published, together with Sun Microsystems, record-breaking TPC-H benchmark numbers (data warehousing industry benchmarks) as well as a series of significant partnerships in the Open Source world.

There has been a lot of work here over the last two years to get us to this point and I am very proud of the team for getting us to where we are today. Two years ago we just had a vision; today that vision became reality – one substantiated by independent industry benchmarks.

For those of you unfamiliar with these benchmarks let me give you a brief overview to explain why we …

Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo. Like Keith Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This article explains the basics of how their technology is different from the current state of the art in complex queries on large amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip. On the surface, the storage engine is not that revolutionary: it is a column-store engine with data compression and some other techniques to reduce disk I/O, which is kind of par for the course in data warehousing today. The chip is the really exciting part of the technology.

The simplest description of their chip is that it …