A few days ago I found myself giving database advice to a friend with a new startup. His problem is a pretty common one: he has a very large corpus of data, over which he will run compute-intensive proprietary algorithms. Both the data and the computation will require a cluster of machines. He has [...]

Many in the blogosphere noticed when Stonebraker and Dewitt at The Database Column took offense at the idea that map-reduce is the solution to many of life’s problems. The idea that a simple idea, promoted by a services company, can blow away 20+ years of distributed database research, bothers them for some reason. Sure, [...]

Today was my first day at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal. After a brief exposure to the amazing “Underground City” (really a shopping mall that is infecting downtown like a cancer), I crashed a workshop for which I had not signed up, and had a completely different experience than I had planned at The Popularity [...]

The opening keynote for this year’s VLDB was a great presentation by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, describing their data management challenges. I particularly appreciated it because it echoed something I’ve been saying for a few years now: Web-scale companies have problems which cannot be managed with standard RDBMS, or with any common research systems, [...]

I was at MIT today and so I ended up going to an invited talk on computer architecture, Subtle Semantics and Unrestricted Implementation of Transactional Memory. Transactional Memory is a very hot topic in systems and architecture. It is perceived to be a better model for programmers, so language designers like it. And there are [...]