Database

Overheard - MapReduce is a screwdriver

“Just because you’ve got the best hammer in the entire world doesn’t make everything a nail. If you’ve got a screw, even a cheap, old, rusty screwdriver is going to do a better job. And MapReduce is a lot better than a cheap, old, rusty screwdriver.” Mark C. Chu-Carroll, Databases are hammers; MapReduce is a screwdriver

RDBs are absolutely brilliant things. They’re amazing tools, which can be used to build amazing software. I’ve done a lot of work using RDBs, and without them, I wouldn’t have been able to do some of the work that I’m proudest of. I don’t want to cut down RDBs at all: they’re truly great. But not everything is a relational database, and not everything is naturally suited towards being treated as if it were relational. The criticisms of MapReduce all come down to: “But it’s not the way relational databases would do it!” - without every realizing that that’s the point. RDBs don’t parallelize very well: how many RDBs do you know that can efficiently split a task among 1,000 cheap computers? RDBs don’t handle non-tabular data well: RDBs are notorious for doing a poor job on recursive data structures. MapReduce isn’t intended to replace relational databases: it’s intended to provide a lightweight way of programming things so that they can run fast by running in parallel on a lot of machines. That’s all it was intended to do.

Overheard - Real ID is a real mistake?

Real ID creates the largest single database about U.S. people that has ever been created. This is the people who brought you long lines at the DMV marrying the people at DHS who brought us Katrina. It’s a marriage we need to break up. Tim Sparapani, as quoted in National ID Card Rules Unveiled

Real ID is back in the news.  Secretary Janet Napolitano (Department of Homeland Security)  is looking at cost effective alternatives…the most controversial of which is an “enhanced” driver’s license with RFID.  It’s making big waves with privacy advocates who see the technology being used for nefarious purposes.

Overheard - Raw data now!

Raw data now! Raw data now! Raw data now! Tim Berners-Lee, getting the crowd to chant at the 2009 TED conference

Founder of the web Tim Berners-Lee spoke of the next grassroots communication movement he wants to start: linked data. Much in the way his development of the web stemmed out of the frustrations of brilliant people working in silos, he is frustrated that the data of the world is shut apart in offline databases.

Overheard - Top 5 tech stories in Australia

In case you weren’t one of the readers stampeding these stories, here’s are the most popular tales from across TechTarget’s five Australian sites in 2008:

1. SearchCIO readers could not get enough of this story comparing virtualisation wares from Microsoft and VMWare.

2. Career advice clearly appeals to networking professionals, who stampeded this piece about how certifications can improve your prospects at work.

3. Old-school is still big for security pros, who loved this piece about five command line tools to detect Windows hacks.

4. The blend of open source NAS and virtualisation proved the most popular mix for our storage-oriented readers.

5. Bluetooth for Business was the story of most interest to SearchVoIP ANZ readers in 2008.

Overheard: Drizle will target MySQL users

Drizzle will target the MySQL core users, the web users whose requirements have been ignored for years while the core MySQL developers have added features that they don’t need. Michael Widenius, What if

Overheard: Using nestable hashmaps instead of ORM

I have never been over the moon with ORM. It solves the need to write SQL in your code, and to iterate through database results sets to form data structures, but it never really addressed the mismatch between true Objects and Data in my opinion. Paul, Is ORM a Dead End?

So why not forget about objects and data encapsulation and use exposed mutable data types instead? Well functional languages have been using this approach for years, an hashmap (Dictionary) with name/value pairs is a mutable data type. You can represent any data type you like by nesting hashmaps. Accepting that all data will be exposed, and that data types are likely to change is a much better fit for database applications where users want to store, navigate and query data.

Overheard: MySQL purchase could be what saves Sun

The MySQL purchase by Sun makes more sense than any other acquisition they have done since they botched NetDynamics 10 years ago. This could be what saves Sun. Dana Gardner, Buying MySQL Could Save Sun

Overheard: Amazon will put your database in a cloud

“Amazon.com has begun publicly testing a third element to its online computing services: a database capability called SimpleDB. The new Web service joins two others the online retailer launched in 2006 that anyone can pay to use: computing horsepower called the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and data storage called Simple Storage Service (S3). SimpleDB works in conjunction with those services, letting customers store, modify, and query data.” Stephen Shankland, Amazon opens testing for in-cloud database

Erick Schonfeld caused a bit of a buzzfire by starting out his blog entry on SimpleDB by saying:

“Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming.”