QStudio 4.09 introduces a number of new features to make exploring data easier than ever.
Column Stats
Allows getting a count of nulls, averages and how many distinct values a column contains by hovering the column header:
Transposed row(s)
Have a very wide table? Want to quickly see all the column?
Transpose from a row to column based layout for those rows. Allowing you to quickly see all values:
Dive-into Nested Results
Double-click on a nested array or kdb structure (table/dict) to pop-out a table showing only the nested item. You can repeat this to dig deeper and deeper into nested data. (Thanks to Oleg/QPad on pioneering this idea).
As well as these new features, a large number of bugs were fixed:
4K Monitor support was significantly improved. You have the option to scale the full UI in preferences.
Apple Mac got a dedicated release and custom App download.
2025-04-22 – 4.08 – Bugfix: Candlestick charts were wrong as receiving wrong timezone from kdb driver. Timezone now set to UTC.
– Bugfix: “Save as” to .sql was shrinking text. Now fixed.
– Bugfix: Show red X close on every document tab.
2025-04-06 – 4.07 – Add UI Scaling and Font size as separate options to help with 4K monitors
– Bugfix: Kdb+ Queries with errors could cause 30 second freezes.
– Bugfix: Switch back to MonoSpaced font. Variable width fonts cause wrong caret position.
– Improved high resolution QStudio icon.
– Mac: Bugfix: Prefences dialog fixed and allows choosing font.
– Mac: Fixed Menu shoing about/preferences/exit.
– Mac: Allow Command+Option+E to run current query.
– 4K handling improved sizing of dialogs.
– Bugfix: Improved duckdb init when folder is empty.
2025-03-13 – 4.06 – Add ability to transpose rows.
– DuckDB 1.2.1. Improve display of DuckDB arrays.
– Add comma separator for thousands option.
2025-02-23 – 4.05 – Upgrade kdb+ c/jdbc.java to allow SSL TLS.
– Add preference to allow hiding all tooltips.
– Double-click on kdb+ table with dictionary/table/list nested in cell will pop it out.
2025-01-23 – 4.04 – Show column info (avg/min/max) when column header is hovered.
– Remove watched expressions entirely.
– Improved UI threading for tree/chart display.
2025-05-08 – Private equity firm TA announced an “All-Cash Offer to Acquire FD Technologies, Owner of Global Real-Time Analytics Leader KX”.
Most people are probably wondering how this came about:
1996 – Brian established First Derivatives (FD) in 1996 from his mother’s spare bedroom (Newry, Northern Ireland) with a loan of £5,000 from the Credit Union.
1998 – Kdb+ – In-memory column based database created by KX
KX and FD work in partnership to grow the business.
2014-10 – First Derivatives acquires a controlling stake in Kx Systems.
2018 – FD agrees to buy out minority Kx Systems shareholders (Arthur and Janet)
2019 – First Derivatives completes acquisition of the minority shareholdings in Kx Systems, taking the company’s total stake in the business to 100 per cent for $53.8 million (€48m) in cash.
“The deal marks an important milestone for the company”, chief executive Brian Conlon said.
2019-07-28 – Brian Conlon, one of Northern Ireland’s most successful businessmen passes away. (link)
2020-01 – Seamus Keating appointed as CEO
2024-03 – FD Technologies broken into 3 separate firms:
MRP – Marketing (spun off into a merger)
First Derivative consulting arm.
FD Technologies owning the KX software business
2024-12 – FD Technologies plc (LON:FDP) completes sale of First Derivative (consultancy) to EPAM Systems, Inc..
2025-05-08 – Private equity firm TA announced an “All-Cash Offer to Acquire FD Technologies, Owner of Global Real-Time Analytics Leader KX”.
Open source tools are now as performant as pre-existing commercial offerings for data analysis and in many ways offer more features.
Proof: See the time-series benchmarks and note how many are open source: https://www.timestored.com/data/time-series-database-benchmarks
Everyone has discovered that column-oriented storage and vector execution is the secret to fast analytics.
DuckDB is on course to become the defacto column oriented database that all others will be compared to.
Clickhouse conquered a number of enterprises but difficuly deploying and getting started now seem like key factors that held it back.
DuckDB Downloads
DuckDB Stars
Underlying Factors
Why has SQL and python won? In many ways these are terrible languages (GIL , SET theory) but they won? I can’t say all the reasons but some things that I believe worked in favour:
Open Source + Free = Hard to beat. We’ve seen open-source companies (license disputes mentioned below) take over every area. VCs and startups have realised making big money selling dev tools requires solving two problems: distribution + technology and the harder one is now distribution. The important thing is getting your product into the hands and heads of as many people as possible. Once there, you can withhold all useful enterprise features and charge for them, assuming AWS doesn’t try the same trick. I do wonder if this is causing the death of otherwise small viable software bsuinesses.
Google = a second brain that worked on keyword search. Languages that had judicial overloading are harder to search than languages with many function names. Google makes it easier to find uniquely named functions that python has. Does anyone still read the manual? nevermind the 500+ page language bibles that were the only way to learn languages 20 years ago?
AI – It hasn’t been a factor to date but AI is similar to the google benefit but even more. The more data and usage, the more chance AI can write your code, write your query etc. Will this reinforce the benefit that fully expanded syntax and popularity already provides? APL could be even more dead than it is already.
2024 has been a good year with new major versions of both QStudio and Pulse released. 1000s of new users using our tools and we continue to release regularly and keep improving. Thanks go to our users for raising issues, providing feedback and commercially backing us.
QStudio is now 100% Free. No registration or license required.
Why? Are you shutting down?
Quite the opposite, we believe free and open source is the future and that is where we are going.
If anything we want customers to take this as a massive thanks.
Thank you for being part of driving QStudio forward and sponsoring development and cheering us along all these years.
Thanks in particular to
Thanks in particular to the large finance firms that took a chance on us. Big firms can be bureaucratic with onboarding, purchasing policies, vendor lists, 30 page contracts so I want to thanks all those individuals that jumped those hurdles to get us onboarded and those that put it on the corporate credit card. Below this post is an image containing what may or may not be some customers and other firms that have provided feedback, assistance and input over the years. Strictly speaking we are not allowed to confirm nor deny customers.
What I would say as an external party is that on average these places knew how to complete paperwork, get out of staffs way and enable them to get work done so they are probably better places to work on average.
Over the years, a few larger firms failed to onboard as those attempting it were ground down under the paperwork.
The good news for them is that QStudio is now free and the paperwork should be halved!
If you have any bugs, issues or feedback to report please join us on github
This is me cancelling all the individual users that paid annually for QStudio after 10+ years of building them up! Similarly all corporate contracts are also terminated.
Thanks
Note: For those who recently renewed we are offering a Free Pulse license for 10x the users you purchased for QStudio. Get in touch for a demo.
Want to create beautiful live updating SQL notebooks?
While being able to easily source control the code?
and take static snapshots to share with colleagues that don’t have database access?
Today we launched exactly what you need and it’s available in both:
QStudio Version 4 – Desktop SQL Client entirely based on editing markdown files locally.
Pulse Version 3 – As a shared team server, where users only need a web address to get started and share results.
SQL Notebook Examples
We have worked with leading members of the community to create a showcase of examples.
These are snapshotted versions with static data. The source markdown and most the data to recreate them are available on github.
Let us know what you think, please report any issues, feature suggestions or bugs on our github QStudio issue or Pulse issue tracker.
Thanks to everyone that made this possible. Particularly Brian Luft, Rich Brown, Javier Ramirez, Alexander Unterrainer, Mark Street, James Galligan, Sean Keevey, Kevin Smyth, KX, Nick Psaris and QuestDB.
DuckDB has skyrocketed in the last year and Amsterdam is it’s home. QStudio will be there in 2025.
31st January 2025 – 16:40 Stock data analysis with DuckDB
One year ago we decided to bundle DuckDB as we thought it was awesome. A free column oriented database that can open local databases and perform ASOF joins at speed! We knew QStudio users would love it. This year Ryan is excited to be speaking at Duckcon #6 in Amsterdam.
SQL+Markdown qStudio experiment 🚀 🚀 Quick report creation with nice git code commits.
If this is something that interests you, message me.
Particularly if you have tried other notebooks and hold strong opinions 😡 .
At TimeStored we are constantly running experiments with both Pulse and qStudio with small groups of users to see what new ideas may provide value. Most fail. They don’t always work out or they don’t gather enough interest to be viable but we think SQLMarkdown might be a winner. We are already finding it useful for our own workflows.
If this is something that interests you, message me.
Particularly if you have tried other notebooks and hold strong opinions 😡 .