Kickfire launched this past week and jumped into the already deep waters of the appliance space. They have not yet gone GA but are working towards a fall release and are presently in beta with several clients. A couple interesting things about their approach is they are focusing on MySQL and they have added a hardware chip component to the appliance the is especially designed to supercharge SQL.

To make sure they are seen as the real deal they joined forces with MySQL parent company Sun to set a new TPC-H benchmark. They set a new Dollar Barrier mark as well as setting a new performance record in the non-clustered category for 100GB. The overall price performance of this system was $0.70/QphH@100GB USD, which is the best in the industry.

Kickfire seems to be getting the performance from a combination of column store format, intelligent indexing and the SQL Chip I mentioned above. They feel they have made important steps towards reducing the effects of the Von Neumann bottleneck.

Tags: Data warehouse appliance, business intelligence, Kickfire