Database history: January 2008 Archives

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" »