A mountain tour of kdb+ and the q programming language
Overview
- kdb+ is an in-memory, column-store database optimized for time series. It has a tiny footprint and is seriously quick.
- The q vector-programming language is built into kdb+. It supports SQL-style queries.
- Q expressions are interpreted in a REPL.
- Tables, dictionaries and functions are first-class objects..
- kdb+ persists objects as files. A large table is stored as a directory of column files.
- Explicit loops are rare. Iteration over lists is implicit in most operators; otherwise mostly handled by special iteration operators.
- Parallelization is implicit: operators use multithreading where it helps.
- Interprocess communication is baked in and startlingly simple.
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