KDB-X: KX releases FREE Commercial KDB license
26 comments
·July 16, 2025starkparker
Context for people lacking it:
- Blog announcement: https://kx.com/blog/introducing-kdb-x-public-preview/
- Product landing page: https://kx.com/products/introducing-kdb-x-public-preview/
kristjansson
Link should be changed to this from the current blogslop
KerrAvon
for anyone else looking for tl;dr on WTF KDB actually is, it's buried in the AI slop marketing text in the blog announcement: "KDB-X is […] both a programming language and a database."
leprechaun1066
The overview here is better than the marketing:
alyandon
I just tried to install the community edition and it fails claiming the license key generated by the site is invalid. Not a great onboarding experience.
steveBK123
do you have a previous community edition installed?
I ran into this than scanned up and saw some warnings about clearing your environment vars & re-sourcing your profile so it no longer points to the old QLIC/QHOME
fidotron
> A quick look at the product licensing page reveals that KDB-X gives you up to 16GB of RAM, 4 secondary threads per process, and 8 IPC connections.
willvarfar
It also says it is not for production use.
bfm
TL;DR TOS
Summary of the KX Community Edition License Agreement:
Key Points:
What you get:
- Free license to use KX software for personal or internal business purposes only
- No support or maintenance services included
- Software provided "as is" without warranties
Major restrictions:
- NO commercial use
- Cannot sell, distribute, or monetize any product that uses or depends on this software
- Cannot bundle it with commercial products
- Cannot reverse engineer, modify, or create derivative works
- Cannot remove copyright notices or trademarks
- Software may phone home to verify valid license
Important limitations:
- KX's liability capped at $100
- They disclaim all warranties including fitness for purpose
- You must delete software if agreement terminates
- Subject to export control laws
- KX can audit your compliance
Legal terms:
- Governed by New York law
- You retain no IP rights in the software
- Confidentiality obligations for 5 years
- KX can terminate at any time
Bottom line:
This is a restrictive free license meant for evaluation/personal use only. Any commercial use or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you need commercial rights, you'll need a different license.
Quitschquat
What would be the closest open-source equivalent for this? Influx?
AUnterrainer
There's nothing that gets close to KDB. You can build an entire framework with just KDB
latenightcoding
With the rise of LLM-coding do these specialized/niche languages lose their edge? (i.e: prototyping speed, job security, etc)
AUnterrainer
No LLM can write KDB yet
pinewurst
As most KDB code is proprietary, one wonders if there's even enough available code to train/steal from.
coredog64
No "public" LLM can write KDB yet.
therein
In this case it is a little beyond specialized and niche. It is right to left too.
null
anthk
Free as in freedoom? Still not.
So, klong for prototyping, and a libre build of 'j' for everything else.
optymizer
What a confusing website. The website is named 'defcon', like the famous defense conference. What does 'defcon' have to do with Q? What even is Q?
The landing page is uninformative. No explanation of what Q is. References ticks, doesn't mention what these are.
The About page is filled with generic words and no substance - so much fluff.
I couldn't tell if KDB-X is an exploit database for Defcon participants, or some other kind of specialized database, and at this point I'm so disappointed by this presentation that I lost interest in whatever this piece of software is or does.
Luckily someone else on HN figured it out and commented with a TLDR, but I'd use this site as an example of how not to design websites.
kristjansson
It’s a pretty terrible secondary source, BUT
The topic is clearly of interest to the community, and isn’t half the fun of HN learning about things other people are interested in, from the sources they deem acceptable? Why would you only want to read things that are immediately and totally legible to you, specifically?
papercrane
> The website is named 'defcon', like the famous defense conference.
Both the defense conference and this are references to the military term DEFCON, that stands for "defense readiness condition". Q here is referring to the Q programming language that is built on top of KDB's K language.
The website is a blog and learning resource for the Q language.
AUnterrainer
Thanks. Looks like at least someone could follow my thought process
unit149
[dead]
Kx released a 32bit, free-for-commercial-use version in 2014 and then reversed course around a year later after banks and hedge funds surprised them by flocking to it for a large subset of their developers / dev machines.
Hopefully they stick to it this time around. It's an incredible system. It's the only thing I've ever used, including Pandas, dplyr & Matlab, where someone could stand over my shoulder asking data analysis questions and I could answer them, on the fly.
LLM's, though notoriously bad (so far) at KDB+/Q compared to other languages, are still a godsend for folks getting started. I recently returned to writing Q after being away from it for 8 years and I've been amazed how good even Google's AI suggestions have been at helping with functions & queries.
Getting started tip: try using Q strictly as a query language, avoid K. Do everything else (data shoveling, devops,...) with a different language.