Quickstep is a high performance database engine. We currently support a SQL interface with plans to support advanced machine learning operations.
Quickstep's design starts with an underlying relational kernel core. The key design philosophy is to ensure that these kernels - and compositions of these kernels - can exploit the full potential of the underlying hardware. We call this design principle running at bare-metal speed. Bare-metal means to fully exploit the latest hardware trends including large main memories, fast on-die CPU caches, highly parallel multi-core CPUs, and NVRAM storage technologies.
For the hardware available in the future, we aim to co-design hardware and software primitives that will allow the data processing kernels to work on increasing amounts of data economically - both from the raw performance perspective, and from the perspective of the energy consumed by the data processing kernels and the applications running on the platform.
Quickstep is easy to get set up. It currently runs on a single node and supports a SQL front-end, and doesn't require tuning parameters. To get started, follow the quickstart guide.
Quickstep is an Apache (incubating) project. If you want to learn more about the community, follow the dev conversation at dev@quickstep.incubator.apache.org. Send a blank email to this address for subscribe instructions. You can also view the mail archive.
The current roadmap is to produce a platform that can run relational database applications using SQL as the interface. The longer-term roadmap is to cover a broader class of analytics.
The link to our blog is here.