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MapReduce — a Major Step Backwards?
The Database Column has an interesting, if negative, look at MapReduce and what it means for the database community. MapReduce is a software framework developed by Google to handle parallel computations over large data sets on cheap or unreliable clusters of computers. "As both educators and researchers, we are amazed at the hype that the MapReduce proponents have spread about how it represents a paradigm shift in the development of scalable, data-intensive applications. MapReduce may be a good idea for writing certain types of general-purpose computations, but to the database community, it is: a giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications; a sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing; not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago; missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS; incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on."
> I don't know why this article is so harshly critical of MapReduce.
> Are these guys just trying to stake a reputation based on being critical of Google?
Um... yes?
The Database Column is being coy about being a corporate blog for Vertica, a high performance database database product, but in fact it is. Vertica is a commercial implementation of C-Store and was founded by Michael Stonebraker, the most prominent proponent of column based databases (get it? the database column). So yes, they have a very good reason to be hostile to Google.
http://www.vertica.com/company/leadership
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/contributors.html