Comment by skruger

2 years ago

For people discovering k for the first time, I wrote https://xpqz.github.io/kbook as a gentle intro.

I am interested, but one thing I have still not quite understood is where to use this family of languages.

As far as I can tell they are best for data analysis but not for heavy numerical computation because most or all of them lack GPU support. is that right or have I got it wrong?

Are there any other use cases?

  • q/kdb+ is used in finance (banking + funds) for heavy numerical computation every day. high-volume realtime data straight from markets, and petabyte/trillion-row historical DBs. it runs on CPU but computation easily parallelizes over cores/clusters.

    regarding use cases, see https://kx.com/resources/use-cases/

    • Thanks, that gives me better feel for it. Mostly analytics, good with large datasets, but probably not great for things where you get a big gain from GPU?

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