Kirix Strata is a specialty web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

 designed for data analytics. Strata offers a browser's ability to view web pages, but also includes additional tools to perform data analysis

Data analysis

Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making...

 and create reports based on structured data from local files, external relational databases and the Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

.

The browser incorporates Mozilla

Mozilla

Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....

's XULRunner

XULRunner

XULRunner is a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation to provide a common back-end for XUL-based applications. It replaced the Gecko Runtime Environment, a stalled project with a similar purpose....

 into a proprietary data engine to create a rich internet application

Rich Internet application

A Rich Internet Application is a Web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, independent sandboxes, extensive use of JavaScript, or virtual machines...

 for working with data. Kirix Strata is a commercial product that uses the cross-platform

Cross-platform

In computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...

 wxWidgets

WxWidgets

wxWidgets is a widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with minimal or no code changes...

 toolkit and is supported on both Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

.

History

Kirix Corporation is a data analysis software company founded in January 2001 by four brothers and a friend. In its early years the company specialized in identifying duplicate payments and other overpayment errors in large corporate accounting systems.

In February 2005, Kirix launched Kirix Strata as a new desktop database for Windows and Linux at the LinuxWorld

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo

OpenSource World is a conference and trade show that focuses on open source and Linux solutions in the information technology sector.The show is owned and managed by IDG World Expo, a business unit of International Data Group...

 conference in Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

. The product combined some of the capabilities of a spreadsheet

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...

 with those of a database management system

Database management system

A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...

 and won the Product Excellence Award in the Best Desktop-Productivity-Business Application category.

In July 2007, Kirix relaunched Strata in beta as a specialty browser for working with data from anywhere, including from the Web. The beta product took the database features of the previously released version and incorporated the Mozilla Gecko layout engine

Gecko (layout engine)

Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....

 to provide Web connectivity. Strata was officially released out of beta in April 2008 with the intention of bringing the simplicity of a web browser to the world of tabular data. Because of the web connectivity and the user-centric analytic features, Strata can also be considered a productivity tool for Business Intelligence 2.0

Business Intelligence 2.0

Business Intelligence 2.0 is a term that refers to new tools and software for business intelligence, beginning in the mid-2000s, that enable, among other things, dynamic querying of real-time corporate data by employees, and a more web- and browser-based approached to such data, as opposed to the...

.

Features

As with other browsers such as Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

 and Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

, Kirix Strata provides tools to view and interact with web pages. However, it deviates by focusing on manipulating and interacting with structured data:

• Data Access: Web data (e.g., HTML tables, RSS
  RSS
  -Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
  
   feeds, CSV
  Comma-separated values
  A comma-separated values file stores tabular data in plain-text form. As a result, such a file is easily human-readable ....
  
   files), external databases (e.g., MySQL
  MySQL
  MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
  
  , Oracle
  Oracle Corporation
  Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
  
  ) and local data files (e.g., Excel
  Microsoft Excel
  Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
  
  , Access
  Microsoft Access
  Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of...
  
  , text-delimited data
  Delimited
  Formats that use delimiter-separated values store two-dimensional arrays of data by separating the values in each row with specific delimiter characters...
  
  ).
• Data Analysis: Sorts, filters, copies, queries, calculated fields and relationships.
• Reporting
• Scripting and Extensions: Data-enabled version of JavaScript
  JavaScript
  JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
  
   with support for SQL
  SQL
  SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
  
  .
• Operating system support:
  • Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu (operating system)
    Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
    
     Linux 10.04 and later
• supports up to 18 exabytes per project; 60 billion records per table; 250 million table per project.