Kickfire's MySQL appliance blows the doors (and price tags) off proprietary databases

For those proprietary database vendors who have been hoping and praying that their myths about MySQL would persist ("For low-end applications, "Not high performance," etc.) , Kickfire just announced a MySQL-based database appliance that should wipe the smirks off Oracle and IBM.

If you get nothing else from this post, remember this: Big performance. Little price.

Kickfire, Inc. today announced the first MySQL database appliance that brings the high-performance capabilities of large commercial database systems to the MySQL market. The company...has built its appliance by developing an ultra-modern database kernel and a revolutionary SQL chip that packs the power of 10s of high-end CPUs. The result is a small form-factor MySQL appliance that delivers the high performance of large systems but with dramatically lower hardware, power, and cooling costs. Separately today, Kickfire and Sun Microsystems announced record-breaking TPC-H price/performance benchmark results that demonstrate the performance efficiency and price/performance leadership of Kickfire's design.

How high of performance?

According to the company, 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. YOu can find the details here.

Not content to stop there, Kickfire also announced partnerships with JasperSoft, Pentaho, Sun Microsystems, Talend and Zmanda to enable Kickfire customers to easily deploy cost-effective, high-performance, end-to-end business intelligence solutions with online backup based on MySQL.

Got that? Big performance. Little price. Very cool company. I got a few calls from VCs today who wanted to invest, but they're too late. Kickfire already raised money from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and The Mayfield Fund. Tier-one investors for a tier-one company...based around open-source MySQL.