I have been an on and off q user for a few years. KDB+/Q is a great system, but in my opinion it is best used for its correct purpose;and that purpose is primar

I have been an on and off q user for a few years. KDB+/Q is a great system, but in my opinion it is best used for its correct purpose;and that purpose is primarily time series and data streaming. The columnar structure of the DB as well as its IPC layer make it very good at creating chains of processes that can be used to stream row updates and branch them out to different processes with different responsibilities. Likewise it's on disk database is great for running complex (time series) queries. This speed and terseness comes at a cost of being fairly "old school" in its approach. It's only recently for instance the we got stack traces, and readability is definitely not for the faint of heart though this depends on how it is written. In my view the biggest thing that is needed right now is better tooling and libraries. Some attempts have been made to do this, and I am hearing that the new initiatives by kx will be addressing this in the coming months. The lack of standardized testing library/framework also can be problematic, as every team that I have seen does it slightly differently, and a "best practice" would beneficial.