Latest release of kdb+ leverages multicore chips.

Latest release of kdb+ leverages multicore chips Kx systems has released v.2.3 of its kdb+ database for Linux, Windows and Solaris operating systems. In response to customer demand, Kx now supports Solaris on Intel, adding to its existing support for Solaris on SPARC. The new release offers improved performance, facilitates the storage and retrieval of complex data types and allows users to extract maximum processing power from next generation multicore chips.

Kx has added multithreaded capabilities to its database to make it easy for developers to take advantage of parallel processing without changing their code. Kdb+v.2.3 offers complete interoperability with existing versions of the product and can be used on 32- and 64-bit platforms. Whether customers want to extract more power from their existing hardware configuration or plan to invest in future multiple core architectures, they won’t have to make any changes to their existing applications to run kdb+ v. 2.3.

"Clients are constantly investing in new hardware and applications to keep up with increasing data volumes," said Arthur Whitney, Kx CEO. "It’s not unusual for a program trader to crunch through gigabytes of trade and quote data in seconds. Kdb+ v.2.3 gives them the capacity to process large amounts of streaming, historical and realtime data simultaneously.”

Other capabilities of kdb+ v.2.3 include faster and more efficient storage and retrieval of character and nested data and the ability to analyse data sets simultaneously instead of sequentially.

“Any financial firm trading in today’s high volume capital markets wants to make their existing hardware work more efficiently,” said Simon Garland, Kx CTO. “Now that traders can make fuller use of their existing hardware with kdb+v.2.3, they can do things like calculate the correlation between hundreds of stocks in parallel, which they had to do synchronously before. With this release we’re giving customers a way to make better use of their current capacity and setting them up to embrace future technologies, much like we did when we introduced 64-bit capabilities with kdb+ in 2003.”

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