January 2008 Archives

In this follow up post, David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker discuss the feedback from their previous post on MapReduce. They focus on four criticisms of their first article: 1) that MapReduce is not a database system and should not be judged as one; 2) that MapReduce has excellent scalability, demonstrated by Google's use; 3) that MapReduce is cheap compared to high-end DBMS solutions; 4) and that their stance was the result of DBMS "gray beards" trying to defend their turf/legacy from the MapReduce "young turks." Continue reading "MapReduce II" »

In this post, David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker discuss MapReduce. While it may be a good idea for writing certain types of general-purpose computations, they believe it is a giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications; a sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing; not novel, as it represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago; missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS; and incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on. Continue reading "MapReduce: A major step backwards" »

The Resource Description Format (RDF) is a way to describe information about relationships between entities and objects. It was originally developed by the W3C as a way to describe information about resources on the Web. It is intended to be the data model used in the Semantic Web, where web pages contain not just text but also structured records describing the data they contain and the relationships in that data. In this post, Sam Madden and Daniel Abadi discuss RDF and database issues. Continue reading "Relational databases for storing and querying RDF" »

With 2007 now in the books, all of us affiliated with the Database Column blog want to thank you for your readership and thoughtful commentary. There are many topics in the publishing queue, but we want to make sure we are covering topics that matter to readers. We encourage you to send us your questions, comments, and ideas for new topics. Continue reading "The Database Column in 2008: Building on initial success" »