Is the One-Size-Fits-All Database Dead?

jlbrown writes "In a new benchmarking paper, MIT professor Mike Stonebraker and colleagues demonstrate that specialized databases can have dramatic performance advantages over traditional databases (PDF) in four areas: text processing, data warehousing, stream processing, and scientific and intelligence applications. The advantage can be a factor of 10 or higher. The paper includes some interesting 'apples to apples' performance comparisons between commercial implementations of specialized architectures and relational databases in two areas: data warehousing and stream processing." From the paper: "A single code line will succeed whenever the intended customer base is reasonably uniform in their feature and query requirements. One can easily argue this uniformity for business data processing. However, in the last quarter century, a collection of new markets with new requirements has arisen. In addition, the relentless advance of technology has a tendency to change the optimization tactics from time to time."

Comments

Re:Perl & CSV

[Ingolfke]

How did Perl & CSV fare?

It failed the "relational" part of the test. But it failed very quickly.

Isn't it just stating the obvious?

[Dekortage]

I've made some similar discoveries myself!

• Transporting 1500 pounds of bricks from the store to my house is much faster if I use a big truck rather than making dozens (if not hundreds) of trips with my Honda Civic.
• Wearing dress pants with a nice shirt and tie often makes an interview more likely to succeed, even if I wear jeans every other day after I get the job.
• Carving pumpkins into "jack-o-lanterns" always turns out better if I use a small, extremely sharp knife instead of a chainsaw.

Who woulda thought that specific-use items might improve the outcome of specific situations?

Re:Perl & CSV

[patio11]

It failed the "relational" part of the test. But it failed very quickly.

Yep. On the plus side, the Perl hacker who put it together only wasted the time it took to write one line. Granted, the line was 103,954 characters long. He considered breaking it up into two lines to improve readability but ultimately rejected the notion -- anyone not capable of reading the program clearly had no business messing with it anyhow. (Quick question aside from the snark: since Perl has associative arrays can't it emulate a relational database? It was my understanding that after you've got associative arrays you can get to any other conceivable data structure... assuming you're willing to take the performance hit.)