New Database Appliance from Kickfire Propels Sun's MySQL to Number One in Price-Performance

Record-Breaking TPC-H Results Open Doors for Rapid Growth in MySQL Business Intelligence

Santa Clara, CA -- April 14, 2008 –- Kickfire™, Inc. and Sun Microsystems today announced Transaction Processing Performance Council – H (TPC-H) benchmark results that break previous price-performance records. The benchmarks were run on Kickfire's new database appliance, which is based on Sun's MySQL™ database. The Kickfire Database Appliance demonstrates the speed of high-performance commercial database systems at a fraction of the cost with an exceptionally small, low-power footprint and the hallmark ease-of-use of MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

Kickfire has broken the dollar barrier for the first time since the TPC-H benchmarks were instituted, coming in at just 70 cents for $/QphH in the 100GB category and claiming the number one spot in price-performance. The company also takes first place as the highest performing solution at 100GB in the non-clustered category.

Kickfire achieves record-breaking performance at low-cost with its innovative database storage engine software and industry-first SQL chip, which delivers the equivalent performance of tens of high-end, general-purpose CPUs. With large on-board memory, compressed columnar storage, automatic index creation and a SQL chip-aware query optimizer, Kickfire has redefined high-performance query processing, without relying on hardware build-outs or complex tuning.

"A growing number of today's MySQL enterprise applications are focused on data warehousing," said Marten Mickos, senior vice president, Database Group, Sun Microsystems. "There is pent-up demand for innovative solutions that provide greater performance at a reasonable cost. Packaging Kickfire's breakthrough SQL chip and powerful database storage engine together into a unique MySQL-based appliance will be of great interest to users for cost-effective data warehouse and BI workloads."

"The market is full of database vendors who are pushing for higher performance, but their solutions come at a significant cost," said Raj Cherabuddi, CEO, president and co-founder, Kickfire. "Our vision calls for making high-performance data warehousing available to the mass market. Kickfire database appliances deliver higher performance than any other offering when customers are constrained by budget, disk space, power or skill set."

Kickfire is formally launching this week at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California.

100GB TPC-H Configuration and Results

Based on the latest 100 GB TPC-H results, Kickfire achieved 49,228 QphH@100GB, the highest reported performance result on the 100GB benchmark in the non-clustered category. The price performance of this system was $0.70/QphH@100GB USD, which is the best in the industry. Kickfire’s price performance metric can be found here.

Total system price over three years is $34,425. The system configuration was 1 x Kickfire Base Server Module, running CentOS 5.0 with: 2 Intel Xeon E5540 2.8GHz processors (each is 1 chip, 4 cores, 4 threads), 16 GB RAM, 8x 73 GB (15k rpm) internal SAS disks, 1 x Kickfire Query Processing Module, with 64 GB RAM. No cluster and total storage/database size ratio of 5.44 (total storage used = 544 GB; 1 GB = 230 bytes). Kickfire’s product will be generally available on October 14, 2008. Further TPC-H results at larger data volumes will be announced.

About TPC-H:
The TPC Benchmark™H (TPC-H) is an industry standard decision support benchmark defined and maintained by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC). The TPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. A vendor is required to go through a stringent testing and audit process prior to officially publishing TPC-H results. More information is available at www.tpc.org.

About Sun's MySQL Database

MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, and packaged software. At www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with commercial subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer"™ -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

About Kickfire

Kickfire provides the first high-performance, easy-to-use database appliance for the burgeoning MySQL market. Based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an exceptionally small, low-power form factor, Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance –- efficiency avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs of today's data warehouse and database offerings. By delivering astoundingly fast query performance out of the box, Kickfire enables organizations to use MySQL for demanding business intelligence, reporting, and analysis rather than migrating to costly, non-open source alternatives. Kickfire appliances scale from gigabytes to terabytes and are based on Linux and commodity hardware. They leverage existing storage as well as the openness of MySQL and its entire ecosystem to ensure compatibility and rapid deployment. For more information, please visit www.kickfire.com.