History
Before developing K, Arthur Whitney had worked extensively with APL, first at I. P. Sharp Associates alongside Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, and later at Morgan Stanley developing financial applications. At Morgan Stanley, Whitney helped to develop A+, a variant of APL, to facilitate the migration of APL applications from IBM mainframes to a network of Sun workstations. A+ had a smaller set of primitive functions and was designed for speed and to handle large sets of time series data.
In 1993, Whitney left Morgan Stanley and developed the first version of the K language. At the same time he formed Kx Systems to commercialize the product and signed an exclusive contract with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). For the next four years he developed various financial and trading applications using K for UBS.
The contract ended in 1997 when UBS merged with Swiss Bank. In 1998, Kx Systems released kdb, a database built on K. kdb was an in-memory, column-oriented database and included ksql, a query language with a SQL-like syntax. Since then, a number of financial products have been developed with K and kdb. kdb/tick and kdb/taq were developed in 2001. kdb+, a 64-bit version of kdb was brought out in 2003 and kdb+/tick and kdb+/taq were brought out the following year. kdb+ included Q, a language that merged the functionality of the underlying K language and ksql.
Read more about this topic: K (programming Language)
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