The problem with that might be the licensing costs once you use it commercially (eg. at work). IIRC the license prices aren't public, but you're looking at over $10k in any case.
I personally prefer J to K in the APL family of languages. They also have a relatively cheap database, Jd [1]. Individual licenses are $600. Still a bit too much for my data mangling needs. :)
$10k isn't a lot (assuming that's right; it could be). I mean, it's a lot if you're used to something like MySQL or Postgres-levels of quality, but I've seen quotes for Oracle being almost $50k per core. MS-SQL is something like $7k per core, and kdb+ is definitely a lot more useful to me than MS-SQL.
There's also a per-core/minute pricing which might be useful.
Sure, kdb+ would probably be worth every penny even at $100k/year when it's the right tool for the job. I gather it's genuinely the best in-memory database for computing arrays of varying rank.
But a lot of the use cases these other tools are good for are small tasks every now and then. I feel kdb+ is in a different category.
where Q.fs is a function in a script thats bundled with the interpreter; the chunk size for reading the file into memory is adjustable by editing the function.
I personally prefer J to K in the APL family of languages. They also have a relatively cheap database, Jd [1]. Individual licenses are $600. Still a bit too much for my data mangling needs. :)
[1] http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Index