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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."
Looks interesting, will check it out. Working URL for the lazy: http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/
I've programmed extensively in assembly. Your statement may be true up to a couple of thousand lines of code. Past that, to avoid going insane, you'll start using things like assembler macros and your own prefab libraries of general-purpose assembler functions. Once that happens, a compiler that can tirelessly do global optimizations is probably going to beat you hands down.
He's the CTO of Streambase, so he's not just a "neutral" academic.
http://www.streambase.com/about/management.php
I agree with this prediction. Database interfaces (such as SQL) do not dictate implimentation. Ideally, query languages only ask for what you want, not tell the computer how to do it.
This can be taken a stage further, with general persistence APIs. The idea is that you don't even require SQL or relational stores: you express queries in a more abstract way and let a persistence engine generate highly optimised SQL, or some other persistence process. I use the Java JDO 2.0 API like this: I can persist and retrieve information from relational stores, CSV, XML, LDAP, Object Databases or even flat text files using exactly the same code and queries, and yet I get optimised queries on each - if I persist to Oracle, the product knows enough about Oracle (and even the specific version of Oracle) to generate very otimised SQL.
Btw. Postgres was a project from Stonebreaker meant to deal with the limitiations of SQL (POST inGRES).
See the history of PostgreSQL.
When the community picked the old, dormant Postgres source code up (no problem due to the BSD licensing), the first that was added (after some debates) was the SQL syntax, hence the name change to PostgreSQL.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
And the reason I hate Perl, more than the fact that the language makes it *possible* to have monstrosities like that one-liner, is that the community which surrounds the language actively encourages them.
Not all of us encourage this.
Its considered *clever* and a mark of great skill that you can strip out all the code that actually explains WTF your code is doing and be left with the perfectly compressed version.
They call this Perl Golf (shaving strokes of your game. Get it?)
Many of us do not consider it clever. Rather, we consider it stupid and counter-productive.
On the other hand, all of the sample answers posted at the Python Challenge are all golf style, and the Python Challenge is supposed to be a learning tool.
This is modeled as good Perl style to folks just starting with the language,
People who do this should be tied up with string and left in small dark rooms. For a month.
the Llama book has lots of code which looks like that, and code samples you find will look like it too.
This just isn't the case. The code samples in the Llama are no more or less obtuse the code samples in my Pragmatic Ruby book.
It appears that the community largely does not teach perl like it is a language that needs to be read.
I wish I could argue more strongly with you here, other than to assert that I come across code in many languages (Perl, Ruby, Java, C, Lisp), on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis, at work and at home, in books, magazines, and online that appear written to not be read.
Your complaint of bad coding practices is endemic to the industry, and should not be used to condemn a language because it allows the freedom to code poorly.
My Heart Is A Flower