QStudio 4.15 Released – Find All

QStudio 4.15 Released today with new “Find All” – Press Control+Shift+F to activate.
Download Now.

Thanks to JPArmstrong for the idea.

Added highlighting support for python, closure, jflex, rfl, javascript, scala, xpath.

Pulse 3.25 Released

Pulse 3.25 released with Conditional formatting, a new form creator and new date picker widgets:

• 2025-09-13 – 3.25 – Enable User Customization.
  • Add burger menu that allows end user chart and table customization (user Control option?).
  • Add conditional formatting to right-click context menu.
  • Tags support multiples.
  • SQL Notebooks – Add copy to clipboard to code displays.
  • Add Clickable SD_LINK columns in tables help.
  • Connection Scalability – Improve JDBC connection pool settings for large 100+ user deploys.
• 2025-09-10 – 3.24 – Improvements to Forms
  • Forms – Form editor now supports multi-column drag-and-drop.
  • Add Icon support to buttons and text inputs.
  • Select multi-dropdown supports select __ALL__ for when there are lots of options.
  • Add intent and size support to all controls.
  • Checkbox and Radio support segmented style.
  • Improved date pickers help.
  • Change default to 30 min refresh.
  • Add ability to delete variables in debug UI.
  • bugfix: Select multi-dropdown no longer scrolls to top on selection.
  • bugfix: Non-editors shown some editor controls when receiving URL.
  • bugfix: SQL Notebooks – Fix show queries button.

100 plus people Fired at KX

• We previously wrote an article on: Kdb+ Acquired by Private Equity
• In July KX was acquired by TA and went private.
• Today 2025-09-04 we are hearing that 100 plus staff may have been let go.What does this mean for KX next?

Update 2025-09-13 – Number being reported is closer to 200.

Update 2025-09-15 – KX and onemarketdata (onetick) have merged.
https://kx.com/news-room/kx-and-onetick-merge-to-unite-capital-markets-data-analytics-ai-and-surveillance-on-one-platform/

QStudio 4.09 – NEW! Dive-into Nested kdb+ Results.

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.
• We upgraded kdb+ c/jdbc.java to allow SSL TLS.

Full Release Info:

All past release changes can be found here.

2025-05-12 – 4.09 – Improve Autocomplete suggestions
– Add namespace listing panel.
– Improve QDoc to add file level details.

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.

Kdb+ Acquired by Private Equity

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.
• 1993 – Arthur Whitney and Janet Lustgarten jointly form the company KX
• 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”.

Pulse 3.14 Released

Releasing dashboards from file to allow git file based deploys:

Improved Form Customization with radio/checkbox inline/disabled/large options. Allow specifying step size and labels for numeric slider.

Send {{ALL}} variables to kdb+ as a nested dictionary:

QStudio is now Free!

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!

We look forward to improving QStudio together.

Being Free opens up more opportunities, please:

• Download QStudio 4.01 and give it a try today.
• If it’s been a few years, QStudio now works with 30+ databases and features SQL Notebooks
• 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.

The Best SQL Notebooks

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.

Ryan will be at Duckcon #6 Amsterdam

Duckcon #6 – Amsterdam

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.

QStudio was at Bigdata LDN

Ryan attended Big Data LDN in September, the highlights were:

• Meeting the QuestDB team in-person and seeing their talk live.
• Listening this talk on modern data lake data formats.
• Complaining to Jonny Press and Gary Davies about over 50% of the hall being AI dominated.