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Kerf Time Series Lang and Columnar DB Open Sourced (github.com/kevinlawler)
107 points by srpeck on July 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



This is great news. Thanks Kevin.

I had said to Kevin I'd put effort towards any similar to q language tha appeared so I guess it's time to step up:

- I myself commit to building a java JDBC driver

- I don't know C well so I will offer $200 to anyone able to add an automated build->release and to at a minimum get a compiled binary available that runs on Ubuntu. (Windows/Mac would be awesome). PR to go to main open repo.

- $200 For a web assembly version that can run online.

Contact details in my profile.


I played around with GitHub Actions in the past, I'll give automated building + release a try...


Ryan, could we get a kerf-friendly version of sqldashboards?


There is also https://github.com/kevinlawler/kerf

> Kerf2 is designed for full concurrency. It also adds transparent type promotion, a C++ instead of C basis, and more.

Which goes unlicensed right now and was created just a bit before the license change in Kerf1. I wonder if Kerf1 will get any more attention or the focus is now at Kerf2.


So an open source kdb+ designed to be easier to learn than Q/k? neat.

Would be interesting to see benchmarks against some of the newer columnar SQL databases, (ClickHouse, DuckDB, QuestDB)

especially considering the mistique arround kdb+'s performance.


The source for this is interesting to read to say the least.

*FIXED SEE EDIT: I tried to compile it but was missing a link reference to the major function.

I will keep poking around but it is definitely a fun source read.

[edit] If you are wanting to compile this on WSL you will need to add an include for <sys/sysmacros.h> to pickup the reference to major.


you also need -fcommon if you're on a recent version of clang


This is great! I had the pleasure of exchanging a couple of emails with Kevin, years ago. He was pretty clear that a programming language as a business was a bad play, even more so a closed-source one. I wonder if this will change anything.


I think, please correct me if I'm wrong, that kerf's db doesn't have support for keyed tables?


It's not actually open sourced, since Kevin didn't include an open source license. All rights are still reserved until he does that.

Upd: oh, sorry, it's inside src/


The issue with the discussion about the license change: https://github.com/kevinlawler/kerf1/issues/10




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