Recently in Database innovation Category

In this response to a Curt Monash post over at the DBMS2 blog, Mike Stonebraker offers his reactions. He sees two categories of relational analytic/data warehouse databases, row stores and column stores, and notes that they have very different characteristics and should not be lumped together. He also points out that if high performance is required, current high-end relational engines can be beaten by a factor of 80 or so on TPC-C. Continue reading "In response to Monash's post on the four categories of RDBMS" »

In this post, Mike Stonebraker comments on a post over at DBMS2 titled "Database management system choices - overview." Mike makes two points. First, he offers his list of the different types of DBMSs that he sees as viable. Second, he discusses OLTP and the shared nothing architecture. Continue reading "Responding to Monash's recent post on diversity of database systems" »

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" »

Consolidation within the Business Intelligence (BI) market continues. After more than a dozen acquisitions made by Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion over the past few years, these BI tools/analytics industry leaders were themselves snapped up in a matter of months by SAP, IBM, and Oracle respectively. But economies of scale enabled by consolidation is just one of the two primary drivers of the new economics of BI. Jerry Held explains how the other driver is economies of innovation that is a result of the continuing stream of new entrants. Continue reading "The new economics of the BI market" »

"Big science" has problems with current database systems, including maintaining the consistency between the data and metadata, differing requirements for various projects, and the lack of automated lineage support. In this post, Michael Stonebraker discusses the underlying issues, notes previous attempts to solve the problems, and asks scientists to help the database research community develop a better DBMS that can support the needs of big science. Continue reading "Database management for "big science" applications" »

Since the 1970s, new DBMS application areas have emerged with very different requirements than OLTP, but none of the major vendors have performed a complete redesign to deal with this changed landscape. Mike Stonebraker discusses how users can now experience blindingly fast data warehouse performance using column-oriented databases. Continue reading "One size fits all: A concept whose time has come and gone" »