Kx Systems Launches Kdb+ Version 3.4 With Enhanced Security

Version 3.4 includes encryption using the Transport Layer Security (TLS)/Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocols, which provide privacy and data integrity between communicating applications. It also supports integration with Tableau, and other visual front-ends, through the latest version of the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) data transfer format, a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems.

Simon Garland, chief customer officer at Kx, says that the addition of TLS support in version 3.4 was driven by demand from the vendor's biggest customers in the financial services sector, who deemed it a "necessary" security feature.

In the "old days" people thought that having a firewall in place was enough and it was up to the IT department to specify what was allowed ‘in' and what wasn't, he says. But now that mobile phones populate the workplace and are connected to the network, "big companies have no idea who's doing what and who's snooping on which conversations...There are all sorts of things that should never get out, such as customer lists. People shouldn't know anything about who's trading, or how much, or where they're doing it from," Garland says, adding that with the TLS support "every connection is encrypted so that if somebody is on the network, then they can't have a quick snoop on the traffic that's going between them, for instance". 

Meanwhile, the inclusion of the ODBC interface will help clients access much larger datasets. Kx has had the ODBC capability previously, but needed to undertake an upgrade of its interfaces in order to work with the visualization and business information packages that customers are now using to put together reports and visuals.

Garland says that the vendor doesn't necessarily recommend ODBC because it's "old and slow." However it's a "very convenient interface" that "everyone is using" to make sense of enormous amounts of data and make presentations which are comprehensible, where they can "explain what the data is showing them."

By incorporating the latest version of ODBC into Kx, users can go to their kdb+ databases with billions of records and pull out the interesting information they need to put into their reports. They can "access the database easily without having to do any extra work, without needing developers to come in and write something specially. It's just a standard interface and they know how to use it. They don't need to come back and be pestering people to get things written or get new applications designed for them," Garland says.