From: "Abby Gruen" <abby@kx.com>
To: <lwn@lwn.net>
Subject: Move over Oracle
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 17:20:39 -0500


PRESS RELEASE 
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:        Abby Gruen 
Gruen Communications
Tel 914.833.4182
Fax 914.833.4183
E-mail: abby@kx.com

Kx Systems Breaks Real Time Barrier
Kdb Gets Sub-second Response on Billion-Row Databases

Miami, Florida, January 24, 2001 - Kx Systems, a pioneer in high
performance vector-based technology, announced today that it has built a
multi-billion tick database application that gives traders and analysts a
powerful new tool for making investment decisions. Based on Kdb, its
ultra-high performance relational database, Kx has built a demonstration
version of the solution in partnership with the Concorde Group Ltd., to
show at the LinuxWorld Expo in NYC next week. This solution leverages the
efficiency of Red Hat Linux and utilizes high performance, high-density
compute servers.

From the same "break the mold" philosophy that started Linux, Kdb from Kx
Systems takes on industry icons like Oracle and IBM with Kdb. Kdb's unique
design optimizes data storage and retrieval, resulting in the ability to
perform complex analyses at speeds 10 to 1000 times faster than traditional
databases.  This improvement in query speed makes it possible to analyze
enormous amounts of data in real time.

The tick database application was built in response to requests from
financial institutions who are under pressure to bring more powerful
predictive tools to the trading floor, particularly tools that use time
series analysis  that is, look at a stock's past series of trade and quote
prices in consecutive order.  Providing real time analysis of this data has
become impossible for significant time horizons, because there is simply
too much data accumulating too quickly.  In this tick database system, Kx
gets sub-second query response rates on 2 years of NYSE tick data for all
publicly traded stocks - over 2.5 billion trades and quotes.

"Before Kdb, we were waiting 60 to 90 seconds for responses to queries on
our system," says an IT Manager for a large private hedge fund. "I decided
to try to speed things up with Kdb, and was able to build a prototype
trading system in Kdb in one week that ran 1,000 times faster than what we
were running at the time.  That convinced us to add a significant
historical component to the real time system, and even with billions of
rows of tick data our response rates are still out of this world."

To demonstrate the power of Kdb in this application, Kx Systems
(www.kx.com) has partnered with Concorde Group, Ltd. (www.concorde.com) a
systems integration company based in Marlborough, Massachusetts to build a
demonstration version of the tick database solution. This demo will be
given at LinuxWorld Expo in New York City from January 31st through
February 2nd at the Jacob K. Javits Center.

Concorde is hosting the Kx historical tick database solution on a loosely
coupled Linux Cluster of 50 Pentium CPU's with 50 GB of available memory
and up to 300 GB of database storage.  The database Cluster is managed via
a special Network Engines AdminEngine, which provides for direct out of
band remote management of the individual Cluster nodes. The AdminEngine is
uniquely suited for management and loading of the tick database
demonstrated here, allowing the Cluster to be monitored, managed and viewed
from anywhere in the world.

At its booth at LinuxWorld Expo Kx will also be offering demonstrations of
other applications built in Kdb, including an eCRM application and a
publish and subscribe system on VALinux servers.

About Kx Systems
Kx Systems is a software company that has been serving international firms
in finance, insurance and telecom since 1993.  Known for innovation and
reliability, Kx has defined a new product category in the database world
the ultra high-performance relational database system. The Kx customer list
includes Zurich Financial Services Group, Telstra Corporation and
CIBC-Oppenheimer.

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