I just tried to install the community edition and it fails claiming the license key generated by the site is invalid. Not a great onboarding experience.
What a confusing website. The website is named 'defcon', like the famous defense conference. What does 'defcon' have to do with Q? What even is Q?
The landing page is uninformative. No explanation of what Q is. References ticks, doesn't mention what these are.
The About page is filled with generic words and no substance - so much fluff.
I couldn't tell if KDB-X is an exploit database for Defcon participants, or some other kind of specialized database, and at this point I'm so disappointed by this presentation that I lost interest in whatever this piece of software is or does.
Luckily someone else on HN figured it out and commented with a TLDR, but I'd use this site as an example of how not to design websites.
Summary of the KX Community Edition License Agreement:
Key Points:
What you get:
- Free license to use KX software for personal or internal business purposes only
- No support or maintenance services included
- Software provided "as is" without warranties
Major restrictions:
- NO commercial use
- Cannot sell, distribute, or monetize any product that uses or depends on this software
- Cannot bundle it with commercial products
- Cannot reverse engineer, modify, or create derivative works
- Cannot remove copyright notices or trademarks
- Software may phone home to verify valid license
Important limitations:
- KX's liability capped at $100
- They disclaim all warranties including fitness for purpose
- You must delete software if agreement terminates
- Subject to export control laws
- KX can audit your compliance
Legal terms:
- Governed by New York law
- You retain no IP rights in the software
- Confidentiality obligations for 5 years
- KX can terminate at any time
Bottom line:
This is a restrictive free license meant for evaluation/personal use only. Any commercial use or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you need commercial rights, you'll need a different license.
QuestDB. It is built for finance workloads (can be also used for other timeseries data, like energy, or aerospace, but has heavy optimizations for common finance data patterns), it is very performant, it has been in used for years at large finance entities, and it is Apache 2.0.
Full disclosure: I am a Developer Advocate at QuestDB.
The Open Source edition does not limit any commercial use or the size of the machine you can install, as per the Apache 2.0 license terms.
If you want more enterprise-y options, like single sign on, or RBAC, there is an Enterprise edition. But Open Source is as performant as the Enterprise version. Enterprise offers also things like replication and TLS on all endpoints, which can be somehow replicated in Open Source with manual sharding or proxies.
QuestDB is just a DB. What people get wrong about KDB is that it's so much more. It's a programming language with DB capabilities. You can use for real time streaming, in memory DB and on disk DB. You can build your entire analytics on top of that. There's nothing else out there that let's you build and entire framework/platform with just one single tech stack.
Kx released a 32bit, free-for-commercial-use version in 2014 and then reversed course around a year later after banks and hedge funds surprised them by flocking to it for a large subset of their developers / dev machines.
Hopefully they stick to it this time around. It's an incredible system. It's the only thing I've ever used, including Pandas, dplyr & Matlab, where someone could stand over my shoulder asking data analysis questions and I could answer them, on the fly.
LLM's, though notoriously bad (so far) at KDB+/Q compared to other languages, are still a godsend for folks getting started. I recently returned to writing Q after being away from it for 8 years and I've been amazed how good even Google's AI suggestions have been at helping with functions & queries.
Getting started tip: try using Q strictly as a query language, avoid K. Do everything else (data shoveling, devops,...) with a different language.
16 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] thread- Blog announcement: https://kx.com/blog/introducing-kdb-x-public-preview/
- Product landing page: https://kx.com/products/introducing-kdb-x-public-preview/
The landing page is uninformative. No explanation of what Q is. References ticks, doesn't mention what these are.
The About page is filled with generic words and no substance - so much fluff.
I couldn't tell if KDB-X is an exploit database for Defcon participants, or some other kind of specialized database, and at this point I'm so disappointed by this presentation that I lost interest in whatever this piece of software is or does.
Luckily someone else on HN figured it out and commented with a TLDR, but I'd use this site as an example of how not to design websites.
Summary of the KX Community Edition License Agreement:
Key Points:
What you get:
- Free license to use KX software for personal or internal business purposes only
- No support or maintenance services included
- Software provided "as is" without warranties
Major restrictions:
- NO commercial use
- Cannot sell, distribute, or monetize any product that uses or depends on this software
- Cannot bundle it with commercial products
- Cannot reverse engineer, modify, or create derivative works
- Cannot remove copyright notices or trademarks
- Software may phone home to verify valid license
Important limitations:
- KX's liability capped at $100
- They disclaim all warranties including fitness for purpose
- You must delete software if agreement terminates
- Subject to export control laws
- KX can audit your compliance
Legal terms:
- Governed by New York law
- You retain no IP rights in the software
- Confidentiality obligations for 5 years
- KX can terminate at any time
Bottom line:
This is a restrictive free license meant for evaluation/personal use only. Any commercial use or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you need commercial rights, you'll need a different license.
Full disclosure: I am a Developer Advocate at QuestDB.
The Open Source edition does not limit any commercial use or the size of the machine you can install, as per the Apache 2.0 license terms.
If you want more enterprise-y options, like single sign on, or RBAC, there is an Enterprise edition. But Open Source is as performant as the Enterprise version. Enterprise offers also things like replication and TLS on all endpoints, which can be somehow replicated in Open Source with manual sharding or proxies.
So, klong for prototyping, and a libre build of 'j' for everything else.
Hopefully they stick to it this time around. It's an incredible system. It's the only thing I've ever used, including Pandas, dplyr & Matlab, where someone could stand over my shoulder asking data analysis questions and I could answer them, on the fly.
LLM's, though notoriously bad (so far) at KDB+/Q compared to other languages, are still a godsend for folks getting started. I recently returned to writing Q after being away from it for 8 years and I've been amazed how good even Google's AI suggestions have been at helping with functions & queries.
Getting started tip: try using Q strictly as a query language, avoid K. Do everything else (data shoveling, devops,...) with a different language.
https://streamyard.com/watch/RGMjB6mdK4eg
Sincerely Yours terrible secondary source with a confusing website