- Blog announcement: https://kx.com/blog/introducing-kdb-x-public-preview/
- Product landing page: https://kx.com/products/introducing-kdb-x-public-preview/
I ran into this than scanned up and saw some warnings about clearing your environment vars & re-sourcing your profile so it no longer points to the old QLIC/QHOME
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.
Both the defense conference and this are references to the military term DEFCON, that stands for "defense readiness condition". Q here is referring to the Q programming language that is built on top of KDB's K language.
The website is a blog and learning resource for the Q language.
The topic is clearly of interest to the community, and isn’t half the fun of HN learning about things other people are interested in, from the sources they deem acceptable? Why would you only want to read things that are immediately and totally legible to you, specifically?
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.
Influx is basically the same niche.
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.
Admittedly, I am unlikely to learn this proprietary DSL, but always good to know what is the best tool for a job.
https://streamyard.com/watch/RGMjB6mdK4eg
Sincerely Yours terrible secondary source with a confusing website
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