Kickfire

Kickfire, Inc. was an analytic database appliance manufacturer. It was acquired by Teradata in August 2010. The Kickfire appliance utilized FPGA hardware acceleration techniques for SQL databases.
column store, which increases performance of sequential record access at the expense of common transactional operations such as single record retrieval, updates, and deletes.
MySQL integrated as a storage engine plug-in, with special modifications to the optimizer to allow query rewrite optimizations over a column store.
An FPGA-based "Query Processor Module" which attaches via external PCI-X bus to a base linux server module. The QPM features a dataflow architecture and implements relational algebra in run time reconfigurable hardware for SQL join execution.
Compression, which reduces I/O bandwidth requirements. High compression is possible because columns of homogeneous datatype are stored together and because updates to the main store are batched.