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0 pointsnl12y ago0 comments

Note that Stonebraker makes some good points, but there are many ways to build scalability and Stonebraker is too fast to dismiss many.

In particular, his criticism of traditional databases seems based more on philosophy rather than evidence.

I'd advise reading both sides of the story:

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2009/09/16/relational-databas...

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2009/07/03/column-stores-and-...

http://architects.dzone.com/articles/stonebraker-talk-trigge...

http://gigaom.com/2011/07/11/amazons-werner-vogels-on-the-st...

http://dom.as/2011/07/08/stonebraker-trapped/

The date on some of those posts in interesting. 2009 is quite a while ago now, and I'd suggest that columnar datastores haven't exactly taken over. Some implementations have made some progress (eg Cassandra), but OTOH many non-traditional datastores have added traditional-database like features (eg, Facebook's SQL front end on their NoSQL system), and traditional databases have added NoSQL features too.

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army12y ago

Stonebraker is a very smart person but he's also not shy about promoting his own companies/research. You generally get a well-informed but very opinionated take on things from him.

VoltDB, for example, is good for certain complex workloads over large but not-too-large data sets. For a lot of situations it isn't really an alternative to memcache+MySQL or a NoSQL solution.

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