A tour through hybrid column/row-oriented DBMS schemes
There has been a lot of talk recently about hybrid column-store/row-store database systems. This is likely due to many announcements along these lines in the past month, such as Vertica’s recent 3.5...
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Kickfire’s approach to parallelism
I was chatting with Raj Cherabuddi, founder of Kickfire recently about Kickfire’s approach to parallelism, and I think that some of the problems they have to deal with regard to parallelizing queries...
View ArticleGreenplum announces column-oriented storage option
I checked Curt Monash’s blog today (as I do on a somewhat daily basis) and saw a new post announcing Greenplum’s new column-oriented storage option. In my opinion, this is pretty big news. I was amused...
View ArticleAnalysis of the "MapReduce Online" paper
I recently came across a paper entitled “MapReduce Online” written by Tyson Condie, Neil Conway, Peter Alvaro, Joe Hellerstein, KhaledElmeleegy, and Russell Sears at Berkeley (University of...
View ArticleDeadlines approaching for two upcoming summits
There are two upcoming events that I suspect will be of interest to readers of this blog.First, the first annual ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2010 (ACMSOCC 2010) will be held June 10th and 11th in...
View Article2009's top blog posts
Below are my top six blog postings of 2009, in order of the number of page views as calculated by Google Analytics:Announcing release of HadoopDB (longer version), and (shorter version). Combined...
View ArticleExadata's columnar compression
I recently came across a nice whitepaper from Oracle that describes the Exadata columnar compression scheme. I wrote up a brief overview of Oracle's columnar compression in the past (in my hybrid...
View ArticleNew England Database Summit 2010 Program
I just finished putting together the program for New England Database Summit, 2010 (thanks to the PC: Yanlei Diao, Olga Papaemmanouil, and Elke Rundensteiner). The schedule is really packed this year,...
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Distinguishing Two Major Types of Column-Stores
I have noticed that Bigtable, HBase, Hypertable, and Cassandra are being called column-stores with increasing frequency (e.g. here, here, and here), due to their ability to store and access column...
View ArticleProblems with CAP, and Yahoo’s little known NoSQL system
Over the past few weeks, in my advanced database system implementation class I teach at Yale, I’ve been covering the CAP theorem, its implications, and various scalable NoSQL systems that would appear...
View ArticleQuick thoughts on EMC acquiring Greenplum
EMC announced today that they are acquiring Greenplum. Below are the first thoughts that crossed my mind when I heard about this deal.Congratulations to the whole team at Greenplum. Every interaction...
View ArticleThoughts on Kickfire’s apparent demise
There have been some recent conflicting reports on the future prospects of Kickfire’s analytical database technology. Forbes reported a couple of months ago that Kickfire sold $5 million worth of boxes...
View ArticleDefending Oracle Exadata
I recently came across a whitepaper from Teradata, written by a senior consultant for Teradata, Richard Burns. This is a very well written piece, and has one of the best overviews of Exadata I’ve seen....
View ArticleThe problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL
(This post is coauthored by Alexander Thomson and Daniel Abadi) It is a poorly kept secret that NoSQL is not really about eliminating SQL from database systems (e.g., seethese links). Rather, systems...
View ArticleMachine vs. human generated data
Curt Monash has recently been discussing the differences between machine-generated data and human-generated data, and trying to define these terms on his blog. I think this is a good subject to dive...
View ArticleWhy I no longer trust EMC [Update: maybe they are not so bad]
[Update: After publishing this blog post I received a very pleasant phone call from two representatives from Mozy informing me they had managed to recover my data. See the end of this blog post for...
View ArticleWhy I'm doing a start-up pre-tenure
Thanks to the tireless work of the entire Hadapt team, we had a very successful launch at GigaOM's Structure Big Data conference last week. In coming out of stealth, we told the world what we're doing...
View ArticleWhy Sam Madden is wrong about peer review
Yesterday my former PhD advisor, Sam Madden, wrote a blog post consisting of a passionate defense for the status quo in the peer review process (though he does say that the review quality needs to be...
View ArticleHadoop's tremendous inefficiency on graph data management (and how to avoid it)
Hadoop is great. It seems clear that it will serve as the basis of the vast majority of analytical data management within five years. Already today it is extremely popular for unstructured and...
View ArticleOverview of the Oracle NoSQL Database
Oracle is the clear market leader in the commercial database community, and therefore it is critical for any member of the database community to pay close attention to the new product announcements...
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