For benchmarks, I would check out STAC M3... kdb+ holds 17 world records there and that is something we’re proud of. The Clickbench benchmarks cited in the article, however, aren’t designed for time series databases and kdb+ isn’t included (probably for that reason). I don’t think it’s relevant here. We also think that speed – and performance in general – is still important to our customers, as they continue to affirm.
As far as accessibility is concerned, I’d like to address in multiple parts:
1) We are invested in creating cloud-native features that are more appealing for smaller firms
2) q is the best language out there (in our opinion) but we also offer a path for Python (including Polars) and SQL developers, which is essential to expanding the kdb+ userbase to the maximum extent. Our entire Fusion interfaces was built to enable more interoperability. We also don’t mandate language lock-in... there is nothing preventing other languages from being used with kdb+.
3) Pricing—this comes up a lot. We already offer a free edition of kdb+ for non-commercial use that is very popular. We recognize there’s more we can do in this area (an opinion expressed by KX leadership too) so new pricing models are actively being evaluated.
4) Our latest release of kdb+ 4.1 included a renewed focus on ease of installation and use, and a new documentation hub is being launched this year to further enhance the developer experience.
5) Our Community is growing rapidly – with now over 6000 members and 10 courses available in KX Academy. We have more and more developers networking to help others learn kdb+ every day with a month-over-month net new increase of members for the past 30 months. We’ve recently launched a Slack channel and developer advocacy program too.
There’s a lot of criticism about kdb+ (and KX) in this article, but a lot of the things devs love the most about kdb+ have been left out. This includes efficiency/compactness, expressiveness of q, vertical integration, and speedy development workflow. Sure, if you want to combine 3-5 tools to do what kdb+ does you can go that route, but we feel we offer a vastly superior experience with performance at scale. A quality that extends to ALL our products, including Delta & KDB.AI, since they are all built on kdb+.
Note: I reached out to the author to discuss, but he declined to talk to us. We posted a response on his blog too, but he never published the comment. It's been a pretty closed off situation for us, so leaving this here.