High-Velocity Data—AKA Fast Data or Streaming Data—seems to be all the rage these days. With the increased adoption of Big Data tools, people have recognized the value contained in this data and they are looking to get that value in real-time instead of a time-shifted batch process that can often introduce a 6-hour (or more) delay in time-to-value.

High-velocity data has all of the earmarks of a big technological wave. The technology leaders are building stream processors. Venture firms are investing money in stream processing companies. And existing tech companies are jumping on the bandwagon and associating their products with this hot trend; making them buzzword compliant.

Some have asked whether high-velocity data will complement or replace Big Data. Big Data addresses pooled data, or data at rest. History tells us that there are …

High-Velocity Data—AKA Fast Data or Streaming Data—seems to be all the rage these days. With the increased adoption of Big Data tools, people have recognized the value contained in this data and they are looking to get that value in real-time instead of a time-shifted batch process that can often introduce a 6-hour (or more) delay in time-to-value.

High-velocity data has all of the earmarks of a big technological wave. The technology leaders are building stream processors. Venture firms are investing money in stream processing companies. And existing tech companies are jumping on the bandwagon and associating their products with this hot trend; making them buzzword compliant.

Some have asked whether high-velocity data will complement or replace Big Data. Big Data addresses pooled data, or data at rest. History tells us that there are different use cases and …

I spent the day Thursday with some of Kickfire’s engineers at their headquarters. In this article, I’d like to go over a little of the system’s architecture and some other details.

Everything in quotation marks in this article is a quote. (I don’t use quotes when I’m glossing over a technical point — at least, not in this article.)

Even though I saw one of Kickfire’s engineers running queries on the system, they didn’t let me actually take the keyboard and type into it myself. So everything I’m writing here is still second-hand knowledge. It’s an unreleased product that’s in very rapid development, so this is understandable.

Kickfire’s TPC-H benchmarks are now published, so you can see the results of what I’ve been seeing them work on. They …