jpbf

I'm interested in this part: "Steele and Sussman tried to start over when they first began working on Scheme, but they seem to have been practically the only ones. And they made, at least from the point of view of brevity/power, some serious mistakes early on."

Paul, out of curiosity, what are those serious mistakes?

You said: As bayareaguy noted: "You have to read the original article very closely or you'll miss their point: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards."

This to me is really funny since I don't think you can view MapReduce as distributed database research. I haven't used it, and while I admit that I might have gotten it all wrong, to me its a library/dsl/paradigm/technique for parallelization of certain data-processing tasks. So to me that statement makes as much sense as "lisp, viewed as a monitor , is a step backward compared to lcds".

Others, that I consider smart, have noticed http://bitworking.org/news/288/Stonebraker-on-MapReduce

Also, while it was a while since i viewed the techtalk on bigtable, and I really agree BigTable is a column-based DBMS, I can't seem to remember that they built it to get around deficiencies in MapReduce, I understood it as a compliment. BUT it might have been much more constructive if, as someone said higher up, they wrote the original article about BigTable, because I do believe that their criticism is actually valid (as in apples vs apples) in some cases regarding BigTable.

Have you read the original article? They are really comparing some abstract MapReduce with RDBMSs and saying: MapReduce sux its not relational. And from my perspective making an ass out of themselves. Some quotes:

"we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale."

"All of the following features are routinely provided by modern DBMSs, and all are missing from MapReduce:

* Bulk loader -- to transform input data in files into a desired format and load it into a DBMS

/../

* Updates -- to change the data in the data base"

If this is not criticizing MapReduce because it's not a RDBMS what is. The only thing worth reading is their summary which is quite good, until it hits this point:

"Last, before MapReduce can measure up to modern DBMSs, there is a large collection of unmet features and required tools that must be added.".

So no, I'm not that impressed with him right now, since 2 out of 3 (I've read the One Size Fits All paper which I found interesting) things I have read about him/from him to me is utter bull*.

Thats why I stated that he's academically merited, which at least is a fact.

Sure the guy is academically merited. But it's not the first time he compares apples to pears.

http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/object-oriented-da...

This everything must be a RDBMS viewpoint seem rather rigid.