Recently in Database history Category
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" »
Don Haderle responds to two commenters from his previous post about DBMS history. He notes that "You ask whether it's possible to render a single implementation of a DBMS that satisfactorily handles all usages (OLTP, analytics, ...) well enough such that we don't need another. I think not. Existing implementations work ... Someday the economics may change -- but not at present. So one leaves the existing system intact and moves the data to another system (e.g., columnar) to do analysis ..."
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Current relational database management systems are largely built on designs from the 1980s. Back then, computers were expensive and slow relative to today's systems. The minimization of expensive CPU cycles -- not I/O considerations -- was the driving force in early relational DBMS design. The market sweet spot was transaction...
Continue reading "Once upon a time ... the origins of today's relational database architectures" »
Large databases require the use of parallel computing resources to get good performance. There are several fundamentally different parallel architectures in use today: shared memory, shared disk, and shared nothing. This post examines each approach in terms of how it impacts database scalability.
Continue reading "Database parallelism choices greatly impact scalability" »
Mike Stonebraker offers his personal highlights of VLDB 2007, including a historical note on RDBMS design, the need to improve database administration interfaces, new capabilities and tools from Yahoo!, and some thoughts on the OLPC project.
Continue reading "Thoughts on the VLDB conference" »
