KX Upgrades kdb+, With A Focus on Generative AI

February 28, 2024 - high-performance analytical databases and vector-based data management provider KX has announced significant enhancements to its kdb+ database. These advancements aim to bolster the database's efficiency and analytical capabilities, particularly for time series and IoT/sensor data, to support AI-driven transformation across enterprises.

kdb+, renowned as the world's fastest in-memory, columnar analytics database, has been pivotal in KX's product development, especially in high-demand financial market data management. The latest version of kdb+ is engineered to process and analyse data at increased speeds, take advantage of AI capabilities, and scale securely to handle more data volumes.

Ashok Reddy, CEO at KX, stated, "For three decades, kdb+ has been at the core of our innovation, empowering the transformation of data into actionable insights. This new version of kdb+ reaffirms our commitment to delivering simplicity, performance, and efficiency across the KX product suite, driving forward the AI-first ambitions of global organisations. It also celebrates our dedication to the vibrant kdb+ user community, whose loyalty and passion have been instrumental in shaping the evolution of our products."

The company's announcement confirmed the focus on AI saying, “The latest enhancements to kdb+ are designed to efficiently manage and analyse the vast datasets needed for generative AI with unparalleled efficiency and scalabilityKey updates to kdb+ focus on efficient large dataset management for generative AI, promising enhanced efficiency and scalability.” kdb+ powers the kdb Insights suite and KDB.AI, offering organisations quick adaptability to changing market conditions through advanced predictive analytics that incorporate diverse data sources. These updates promise accelerated data ingestion, improved query speeds, and reduced storage costs.

Charles Skelton, KX Chief Scientist, expressed excitement about the new enhancements, "I'm particularly excited for our customers to experience new features, such as work-stealing, unified thread-scheduler, and the increased capacity for network connections. At a developer level, I'm certain our community will enjoy the new language features around pattern matching that we previewed at our user conference in 2023."

The upgrade boasts several technical improvements, and include:

🔹 Multi-threaded CSV Parser: Halves time-series data ingestion times, enabling faster analysis and quicker updates to AI models, both of which are crucial for real-time decision-making.

🔹 Peach with Work-Stealing Algorithm: Increases query execution speed by 30%, enhancing the performance of complex query executions and AI model computations.

🔹 Unlimited Network Connections: Allows for scalability to one million+ connections, delivering robust performance in high-volume time series data environments and AI applications.

🔹 HTTP Persistent Connections: Reduces connection overhead significantly, facilitating real-time data processing and enhancing the efficiency of data exchanges.

🔹 Enhanced TLS and OpenSSL: Provides secure, encrypted data transmission to ensure trust and compliance deemed crucial for regulated industries.

🔹 Additional algorithms for at-rest compression: Reduces storage costs while maintaining accessibility and optimising data storage for AI operations, without compromising data access speed.

Reddy concluded, "This version of kdb+ turbocharges our commitment to differentiation in the name of customer value and reaffirms our position at the forefront of the industry. We look forward to continuing to push boundaries and set new standards in high-performance analytics databases for time series and IoT/Sensor data management."

Kdb+ optimizes storage, ensures secure data transmission, streamlines data transfer processes, increases data connection scalability, enhances query execution performance and accelerates time series data ingestion. The time series database utilizes the powerful Q programming language, as well as Python and SQL, and is known for its high-performance, in-database analytic capabilities, holding 15 of 17 world records in STAC benchmarks. Kdb+ is the engine that powers critical missions for enterprises across the world and, time and again, has set the standard for transformational AI solutions.