Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a way to use this at my company without the monstrous price tag. I also wish kdb+ came with much better dashboard support kinda like Tableau...I want to retrieve and mold my data quickly with kdb+'s query language and once it is in the proper form, play with several chart types.

View on HN

You might be interested in hobbes, it's free and open source, and we use it with some very large/complex data sets:

https://github.com/Morgan-Stanley/hobbes

The PL is a little different (very similar to Haskell), interoperation with C/C++ is much more direct, and it's also suitable for low-latency applications (where the boxing overhead in K would be unsuitable).

Try Jd; it's almost as good and much cheaper.

http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Index

The 32-bit edition is free

Can't be used commercially.

You can build a PoC/argument for why your organization should use it commercially

Very difficult with large IT departments to get something unusual like this since you need hardware, a way to transfer data from your main database into an SSD to really take advantage of kdb+. Doing that would step on the toes of several departments and would require a large project to happen. Then you have the problem where many people aren't array language savvy. If kOS had a better way to build real time dashboards I would pay more attention. I really wish I could get a personal setup at work to do this (on the cheap), but classic IT really hates things outside their cotrol.

classic IT really hates things outside their cotrol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT

The author of that article has a very biased view tho'. An organisation that finds a lot of shadow IT happening probably ought to replace the head of the IT department since he or she is clearly not delivering what the users actually need.

From the link: Shadow IT can act as a brake on the adoption of new technology

LOL!!!

IT should exist to help the domain users, but after a point they get too big and start to dictate what gets used even if nobody wants it. Like choosing the data analytics technology for the data analytics team when it is what they don't want/need. So then your data analytics team eventually goes outside budget to get what they actually wanted and you have two products. Very dysfunctional and common.

My IT department got suuuuuper confused just by the "db" in "kdb". It's a database! That means it must have roles and schemas and basically be a clone of Oracle! Here, fill out these 5,000 pages of paperwork!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com