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

Prediction...

[Ingolfke]

1) More and more specialized databases will begin cropping up.
2) Mainstream database systems will modularize their engines so they can be optimized for different applications and they can incorporate the benefits of the specialized databases while still maintaining a single uniform database management system.
3) Someone will write a paper about how we've gone from specialized to monolithic...
4) Something else will trigger specialization... (repeat)

Dvorak if you steal this one from me I'm going to stop reading your writing... oh wait.

one size fits 90%

[JanneM]

It's natural to look at the edges of any feature or performance envelope. People that want to store petabytes of particle accellerator data, do complex queries to serve a million webpages a second, have hundreds of thousands of employees doing concurrent things to the backend.

But for most uses of databases - or any back-end processing - performance just isn't a factor and haven't been for years. Enron may have needed a huge data warehouse system; "Icepick Johhny's Bail Bonds and Securities Management" does not. Amazon needs the cutting edge in customer management; "Betty's Healing Crystals Online Shop (Now With 30% More Karma!)" not so much.

For the large majority of uses - whether you measure in aggregate volume or number of users - one size really fits all.

Re:Perl & CSV

[Ingolfke]

How did Perl & CSV fare?

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

Imagine that....

[NerveGas]

... a database mechanism particularly written for the task at hand will beat a generic one. Who would have thought?

steve

(+1 Sarcastic)

Dammit

[AKAImBatman]

I was just thinking about writing an article on the same issue.

The problem I've noticed is that too many applications are becoming specialized in ways that are not handled well by traditional databases. The key example of this is forum software. Truly heirarchical in nature, the data is also of varying sizes, full of binary blobs, and generally unsuitable for your average SQL system. Yet we keep trying to cram them into SQL databases, then get surprised when we're hit with performance problems and security issues. It's simply the wrong way to go about solving the problem.

As anyone with a compsci degree or equivalent experience can tell you, creating a custom database is not that hard. In the past it made sense to go with off-the-shelf databases because they were more flexible and robust. But now that modern technology is causing us to fight with the databases just to get the job done, the time saved from generic databases is starting to look like a wash. We might as well go back to custom databases (or database platforms like BerkeleyDB) for these specialized needs.

Re:Noticed how roll your own is faster?

[smilindog2000]

I write all my databases with the fairly generic DataDraw database generator. The resulting C code is faster that if you wrote it manually using pointers to C structures (really). http:datadraw.sourceforge.net. Its generic, and faster than anything EVER.

Duh

[Reality Master 101]

Who thinks that a specialized application (or algorithm) won't beat a generalized one in just about every case?

The reason people use general databases is not because they think it's the ultimate in performance, it's because it's already written, already debugged, and -- most importantly -- programmer time is expensive, and hardware is cheap.

See also: high level compiled languages versus assembly language*.

(*and no, please don't quote the "magic compiler" myth... "modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.)

Re:Duh

[Waffle Iron]

*and no, please don't quote the "magic compiler" myth... "modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.

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.

Re:Duh

[wcbarksdale]

Also, to successfully hand-optimize you need to remember a lot of details about instruction pipelines, caches, and so on, which is fairly detrimental to remembering what your program is supposed to do.

Re:Noticed how roll your own is faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks interesting, will check it out. Working URL for the lazy: http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/

Please reduce lameness

[suv4x4]

We're all sick with "new fad: X is dead?" articles. Please reduce lameness to an acceptable level!
Can't we get used to the fact that specialized & new solutions don't magically kill existing popular solution to a problem?

And it's not a recent phenomenon, either, I bet it goes back to when the first proto-journalistic phenomenons formed in early uhman societies, and haunts us to this very day...

"Letters! Spoken speech dead?"

"Bicycles! Walking on foot dead?"

"Trains! Bicycles dead?"

"Cars! Trains dead?"

"Aeroplanes! Trains maybe dead again this time?"

"Computers! Brains dead?"

"Monitors! Printing dead yet?"

"Databases! File systems dead?"

"Specialized databases! Generic databases dead?"

In a nutshell. Don't forget that a database is a very specialized form of a storage system, you can think of it as a very special sort of file system. It didn't kill file systems (as noted above), so specialized systems will thrive just as well without killing anything.

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.)

Re:Perl & CSV

[patio11]

I think it implements a Y combinator. Then again, it could just print out "Just another perl hacker". But I'm guessing on the Y combinator. Lets break it down so its readable:

sub Y (&) {
my $le=shift;
return &{
sub { ## SUB_A
&{
sub { ## SUB_B
my $f=shift;
&$f($f)
}
} ##Close SUB_A's block
(sub { ## SUB_C
my $f=shift;
&$le(sub { ##SUB_D
&{
&$f($f)
}
(@_)
}## END SUB_D
)} ##END SUB_C
); ##End the block enclosing SUB_C
} ## END SUB_A
} ## Close the return line
} ##Close sub Y

Y can have any number of parameters you want (this is sort of a "welcome to Perl, n00b, hope you enjoy your stay" bit of pain). The first line of the program assigns le to the first parameter and pops that one off the list. That & used in the next line passes the rest of the list to the function he's about to declare. So we're going to be returning the output of that function evaluated on the remaining argument list. Clear so far?

OK, moving on to SUB_A. We again use the & to pass the list of arguments through to ... another block. This one actually makes sense if you look at it -- take the first argument from the list, evaluate it as a function on itself. We're assuming that is going to return a function. Why? Because that opening parent means we have arguments, such as they are, coming to the function.

OK, unwrapping the arguments. There is only one argument -- a block of code encompassing SUB_C. (Wasted 15 minutes figuring that out. Thats what I get for doing this in Notepad instead of an IDE that would auto-indent for me. Friends don't let friends read Perl code.)

By now, bits and pieces of this are starting to look almost easy, if no closer to actual readable computer code. We reuse the function we popped from the list of arguments earlier, and we use the same trick to get a second function off of the argument list. We then apply that function to itself, assume the result is a function, and then run that function on the rest of the argument list. Then we pop that up the call stack and we're, blissfully, done.

So, now that we understand WTF this code is doing, how do we know its the Y combinator? Well, we've essentially got a bunch of arguments (f, x, whatever). We ended up doing LAMBDA(f,(LAMBDA(x,f (x x)),(LAMBDA(x,f (x x)))) . Which, since I took a compiler class once and have the nightmares to prove it, is the Y combinator.

Now you want to know the REALLY warped thing about this? I program Perl for a living (under protest!), I knew the answer going in (Googled the code), and I have an expensive theoretical CS education which includes all of the concepts trotted out here... and the Perl syntax STILL made me bloody swim through WTF was going on.

I. Hate. Perl.

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.

Write-only languages

[mysticgoat]

As any English teacher will tell you, any language that will support great poetry and prose will also make it possible to write the most gawdawful cr*p. Perl bestows great powers, but the perl user must temper his cleverness with wisdom if he is to truly master his craft.

However in this specific case Google reveals that

## The Y Combinator
sub Y (&) {
my $le=shift;
return &{
sub {
&{sub { my $f=shift; &$f($f) } }
(sub { my $f=shift; &$le(sub { &{&$f($f)}(@_) }) });
}
}
}

was simply "borrowed" from y-combinator.pl. This is an instance of Perl being used in a self-referential manner to add a new capability (the Y combinator allows recursion of anonymous subroutines (why anyone would bother to do such an arcane thing comes back to the English teacher's remarks)). Self-referential statements are always difficult to understand because, well, they just are that way (including this one).