Kx's New Release Allows Intelligent Compression, Reduces Latency, and is Faster Than Ever

PALO ALTO, California, August 31, 2010 - Kx Systems, the leader in high-performance database and
timeseries analysis, has announced today the release of kdb+ v2.7. In
response to growing market demand, this version comes with several
enhancements, of which intelligent file compression, enhanced memory
management and a performance increase of up to 20% are the most significant.
With constantly growing data volumes, the costs of storage are an
increasingly important consideration for global financial institutions.
Regulatory requirements are an additional driver for storing greater
quantities of data.

Kx chief strategist, Simon Garland, comments: "As far as our
clients are concerned this is a straight latency to dollars equation.
Compression only makes sense on fast, multi-core hardware, for example
Intel's latest processors, because using a few cores for compression - out of
a total of say 32 cores - gives very efficient compression and is a very good
use of multi-core machines."

While most vendors only give their clients an 'on/off' option
for compression, Kx allows intelligent compression through a choice of
algorithms and a broad range of settings, driving down storage requirements
and latency, and optimising CPU usage. The user is able to set the desired
compression levels, by specifying which data to compress and how heavily to
compress it. For example, data that's a day old might not be compressed at
all, data that is up to a week old could have only selected,
customer-specified fields compressed, while data that is older than three
months might be fully compressed. kdb+ allows clients to use third-party
algorithms, or use Kx's proprietary, built-in compression algorithms. Kx's
default, fast, proprietary algorithm compresses data very efficiently, while
the storage requirements for TAQ-like (trade & quote) data, for example, are
significantly reduced.

Garland continued: "We have been considering whether to add
file compression to kdb+ for a while, but have decided to do it now because
of customer demand. Our customers wanted an efficient way of storing their
data - large institutions have to store hundreds of terabytes of data, so how
it's stored, and whether it's easily and quickly accessible - with minimal
latency - is hugely important to them. Because there is usually a trade-off
between the amount of compression vs. speed of access, we have given our
clients a choice of which data to compress and how aggressively to compress
it."

"Intel has a long track record working closely with leading
software firms like Kx systems to take advantage of our technology. The new
release of kdb+ represents an innovative use of the capabilities of the
newest Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors, taking advantage of cores to enable
compression," said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel's
Data Center Group Marketing. "The solution is a great example of how leading
edge software running on advanced Xeon processors can deliver significant
customer value."

Other noteworthy benefits of v2.7 include further enhanced
memory management. This translates directly into improved speed: each new
version of kdb+ is significantly faster than the previous, and this is no
exception, being up to 20% faster than v2.6. The new version also introduces
protection against invalid incoming data, with a data structure verification
mechanism which detects invalid user data structures and issues an alert,
allowing appropriate action to be taken. This provides more robust
protection, something which is especially important in an environment of
increasing data volumes.

Kx's compression algorithms are platform-independent and
available on all operating systems. Third party compression hardware can also
be used, if available. Clients can use operating system specific or third
party algorithms.

Notes to editors

About Kx

Kx offers a unified approach to real-time and historical data
analysis with its high-performance kdb+ database platform. kdb+ provides a
portable 64-bit implementation of our expressive query and programming
language to analyze and store streaming events, manipulate in-memory and
on-disk databases, and build distributed low-latency applications.

Our focus is on delivering the best performance and
flexibility for high-volume, data-intensive analytics and applications. We
built the technology. You build your business. For more information visit
kx.com

    Editorial Contact:

    John Norris
    Moonlight Media
    Tel: + 44(0)20-7250-4770
    Email: john@moonlightmedia.co.uk

Editorial Contact: John Norris, Moonlight Media, Tel: + 44(0)20-7250-4770, Email: john at moonlightmedia.co.uk