Kx Systems was founded to address one of the most basic problems in high-performance computing: the inability of traditional relational database technology to keep up with the explosive escalation of data volumes. Ever since, the company’s singular goal has been to provide its customers with the most efficient and flexible tools for ultra-high-speed processing of real-time, streaming and historical data.
PERFORMANCE
Built on a unique computer programming paradigm, Kx's kdb+ database and its associated programming language, q, use a single architecture to access billions and trillions of structured data records, resulting in blazingly fast processing times — many times faster than those of competitive technologies.
MISSION CRITICAL
Kx customers are market leaders in their fields — from top investment banks and hedge funds to premier energy companies, pharmaceutical firms, and scientific research institutions. Our powerful software allows these companies to tackle the most complex and data-intensive applications.
SIMPLICITY
Kx's elegant architecture, minimal storage requirements, and ultra efficient utilization of hardware combine to deliver a lower TCO. It has been specifically designed to allow the database to scale out easily as data volumes grow – without losing performance.
Kx Technology
The basis for Kx Technology is a uniquely integrated platform which includes a high-performance historical time-series columnar database called kdb+, an in-memory compute engine, and a real-time streaming processor all unified with an expressive query and programming language called q.
Designed from the start for extreme scale, and running on industry standard servers, the kdb+ database has been proven to solve complex problems faster than any of its competitors.
Kx's time-series database is optimized for Big Data analytics. The columnar design of kdb+ means it offers greater speed and efficiency than typical relational databases. Its innovative native support for time-series operations vastly improves the speed and flexibility of queries, aggregation, joins, and analysis of business information – be it structured, semi-structured, or key value data.
Kdb+ is different. Its built-in functional array language, q, includes a superset of SQL that operates directly on the data, removing the need to ship query results to other applications for analysis. Kdb+ and q make full use of the intrinsic power of modern distributed architectures, delivering unparalleled performance, proven again and again in industry benchmarks and real world experience.
Scalability
Getting bigger without getting slower.
The design of kdb+ allows it to easily scale horizontally and vertically as data volumes grow, without losing performance.
Banks, trading firms and financial institutions have used Kx technology for lightning fast processing of vast amounts of data for over two decades, before the phrase "Big Data" was even coined.
Today sectors including utilities, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, and genome research are adopting kdb+ to solve their Big Data problems as they find more stack-based architectures are proving too expensive and slow to scale efficiently.
Single Platform
On disk. In memory. Streaming.
For many businesses, the promise of Big Data analytics was the ability to use both streaming and the vast amounts of historical data effectively.
However, the reality found by many is having to install a stack of different solutions from different vendors. Each layer in the stack brings its own set of compatibility, maintenance, and support issues, often requiring a plethora of different skill sets. Kx Technology can address every part of the data-stream as it passes through the business, in a single unified architecture.
Historical disk-based data, in-memory databases, the complex processing of events, and real-time streams are all managed by Kx using just one underlying technology. Analysis of historical trends can be re-used for real-time analytics, creating tremendous reductions in development time and ongoing maintenance costs.
kdb+'s exceptional speed in analyzing data, wherever it is stored, enables businesses to visualize its complexities in ways they found impossible before.
Lower TCO
More costs less.
When choosing a technology platform, a seemingly difficult balance needs to be achieved between the bottom-line impact of real world costs, and the top-line benefits of rapid delivery, high performance, and ability to meet the changing requirements of the business. Kx Technology demonstrably allows for both, without compromise.
Our market-leading efficiencies of hardware utilization, the lower footprint, the lower maintenance and operational costs coupled with the otherwise unheard of productivity with developing in the kdb+ environment means that a Kx implementation will always work out to be more cost effective than alternatives.
In conjunction with this, the Kx Technology platform has both the tooling and the underlying language, q, that our customers tell us enables for the very rapid development of full solutions, thus delivering to the business the rapid change ability that the top-line demands.
Featured Resources for Kx Technology
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The 21st Century Time Series Database
Bloor White Paper – Kx & The Internet of Things
Intel Case Study – High Performance for Big Data
Data Informed eBook – The Database Decision
Real-Time Actionable Insights with Intel & Kx Systems
Kx on The Value of Time: Solving the Cost of Compliance
Kx and Hadoop Ecosystems Whitepaper
Kx shatters STAC benchmarks for tick data analytics on Dell EMC DSSD D5
Kx data scientist and developer Mazin Hassan looks at how exploding volumes of consumer shopping data being generated by smartphones and mobile devices are transforming the retail tech industry. With the current retail market in the USA alone surpassing the $2.6 trillion mark, the retail tech pie is very large, and Kx technology is well suited for analyzing streaming retail data and for presenting powerful visualization tools for understanding it.
As Kx expands into industries beyond financial services, data-driven fields of study, like astronomy, are emerging as use cases for the kdb+ database. Kdb+ developers Andrew Magowan and Jame Neill’s whitepaper explores the opportunities for kdb+ in observational astronomy, inspired in part by the construction of new infrastructure that has the potential to record volumes of data that have never before been seen in the field.
Stellar performance in third-party benchmarks is a tradition at Kx, and now we can add a new benchmark to the list, the taxi ride benchmark developed by Mark Litwintschik. This latest benchmark queries a 1.1 billion New York City taxi ride dataset. Our results were over four orders of magnitude faster than any other CPU technology and comparable to GPU-based code.
The Kx Fundamentals course is an introductory level three-day class for people who want to learn kdb+ and the principles of vector programming. Developers who complete this course will be fully able to use kdb+ to manage data from multiple data sources and interact with both in-memory and on disk kdb+ installations.
Kx for Algos provides a complete suite of scalable algorithmic trading functionality, based on market data signals, including strategy development, matching engines and backtesting. Out-of-the-box dashboards provide feature-rich visualization and control tools which can be effortlessly customized for specific trading, monitoring and research requirements.
Kx for Flow is a powerful, market-neutral FX trading platform that gives a clear view of the marketplace through its graphically rich real time visualizations. Flow’s built-in connectivity to the full liquidity market enables the creation of deep, customized liquidity pools. It supports Spot, Forwards, Swaps, NDFs, Metals and CFDs trading all through one system.
Kx for Surveillance enables financial institutions to instantly detect known trading violations like layering, spoofing or marking the close. Customers can calibrate their parameters in real time to improve their detection quality and accuracy. The flexibility of the historical database and replay engine eases retrospective investigation for new types of fraudulent behavior and suspicious activity.
Kx for Monitoring helps clients ensure their day-to-day operations run smoothly and on schedule. It provides a set of customizable dashboards that display high-level information on the current status of primary indicators as well as real-time alerts and notifications of issues. Historical data is retained for follow-up investigations and root cause analysis.
Dashboards for Kx provides rich visualization of real-time streaming, intraday and historical business data. The easy-to-use yet powerful drag-and-drop interface enables users to quickly build customized dashboards. Content can be displayed through a wide range of innovative widgets, enabling detailed filtering, aggregation and drill down.
Analyst For Kx provides a complete real-time data transformation, exploration and discovery workflow. Users can manipulate massive datasets without programming through the intuitive point-and-click interface. Analysts can use flexible spreadsheets to perform simple or complex analytical computations in real time, with full scripting support.
Stream for Kx is a proven data management solution that can be deployed locally, in the cloud, or as part of a wider Big Data architecture. With unrivalled performance, it allows firms to manage their analytics and visualization needs in a single platform, or as an ultra-fast component of a multi-platform solution.
Using Control for Kx, organizations can rigorously manage their application landscape. They can instantly determine what processes are running and who owns them as well as their parameters and functionality settings. The development environment provides a framework for extending applications in a swift but controlled manner that promotes reuse, imposes standards and improves quality.
Kx offers a 32-bit version of kdb+ for free so you can try it for yourself and see how powerful and fast it is. This download has all the compatibility and functionality of the full 64-bit version, and is for non-commercial use only. A Raspberry Pi version is also available. Click below to download Kdb+ today.
