2020 Roadmap for kdb+ Project

The roadmap below has been set out with the needs of "enterprise kdb+ users" in mind. For more background, see:

Enterprise kdb+ vs. Small Team kdb+.

2020Q1 Invite Existing Projects To Join FINOS.

Although kdb+ itself is a commercial product, there have been many frameworks, front ends, and utilities developed for it that have been released as Open Source. Unfortunately, very few of these projects has developed a community around them due to majority of kdb+ users being employed by financial services firms with strict policies around IP ownership and exfiltration of source code.

Bringing projects under the FINOS umbrella would allow potential contributors at banks, etc. to go through a single, well-understood internal workflow for approval to contribute to any of the FINOS projects. This would be a significant time savings on the part of the the employer and employee compared to a review by the Legal Department of contribution risks on a project-by-project basis.

The project owner would benefit from having a more engaged community and the possibility of receiving actual code contributions rather than just feature requests.

2020Q2 Utility Functions

Although comprehensive frameworks can give "green field" projects a significant head start, owners of existing kdb+ plants might shy away due to:

significant learning curve
requires risky changes to legacy code

Therefore, more energy will be invested in encouraging contributions of smaller utilities. A lot of these already exist in some form in developer toolboxes. Contributing them to FINOS will provide an opportunity for them to be reviewed by highly-experienced practitioners who can identify edge cases or performance optimizations.

2020Q3 FINOS ODP

The hope is that onboarding an existing Open Source project to the FINOS kdb+ Project would bring us to the point where leveraging more of ODP would be worthwhile. This might start with document generation via Docusaurus with tentative steps towards CI / CD.

2020Q4 C / C++ Plugin Contributions

The ethos of kdb+ is to do a few things very well (particularly "asof joins") and let the user plug in C / C++ libraries as necessary.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Craig-Symonds-and-Mohsen-Agsen-C-Renaissance
- "C++ can be thought of as the dark matter of the developer universe: there is so much of it all around us, hiding in the computational shadows, powering so much of what we take for granted, technologically."

There are simple-yet-useful plugins just waiting to be shared...

Closing Remarks

This year, we will take a two-pronged approach. We're seeking existing projects that would result in a win-win outcome for project owner and potential consumers under FINOS. We will also be seeking small contributions of utility functions to socialize useful, well-tuned code with the larger kdb community.