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MS Releases Open Source Alternative To BigTable

Posted by kdawson on from the devil-puts-on-gloves dept.

gollito writes in with news that Microsoft has released an open source alternative to Google's BigTable file system, which is used on large distributed computer clusters. Matt Asay writes for CNet: "I also believe that Microsoft's fear-mongering around open source cost it years of productivity and quality gains that it could have been delivering to customers through open source. I hope that reign of ignorance is over."

6 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's not an alternative to BigTable by prockcore · · Score: 5, Informative

    Using Google's AppEngine, you can use BigTable.. so while you can't install it on your own servers, you can still write software that uses it.

  2. Re:Crap by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    They did: they gave to the Hadoop project an open source equivalent to Google's BigTable. Not only was this mentioned in the article, it was also mentioned in the summary.

    Note also that while Google has a bigTable, they have not released it as open source (as far as I can tell, but they do sell it as a webservice). So there may be some desire to undercut Google here with this move.

    --
    Qxe4
  3. HBase isn't a Microsoft product by bryanduxbury · · Score: 5, Informative
    This article is really confused. Powerset, before it was acquired by Microsoft, started work on HBase, which is a BigTable-like storage system that runs on Hadoop. Both HBase and Hadoop are Apache projects that are out in the open basically in no relation to Microsoft.

    Microsoft has allowed two of the primary HBase developers, who work at Powerset, to continue their open-source work on HBase, which is definitely cool. But to say that Microsoft is releasing this is just flat out wrong.

    (Full disclosure: I am a non-Microsoft-employed HBase committer.)

  4. Re:Crap by bockelboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, you're not even close.

    A company called Powerset developed the open-source alternative to BigTable called HBase. This was developed as an Apache Software Foundation project under the Apache license.

    Microsoft bought Powerset for a bucket of money because their search technology based of Hbase was pretty damned good. This was last year. This year, the folks behind powerset - as Microsoft employees - were given the go-ahead to continue committing to the ASF project and they continue to make it better. For what I can see, they aren't keeping anything juicy in-house.

    It's honest-to-goodness MS committing to an Apache project.

  5. Re:really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do some real research and stop proliferating garbage. The SpiderTCP stack used in NT3.1 was licensed from Spider Systems, who obtained and modified the BSD code, which was distributed under the BSD license. SpiderTCP is not and has not ever been open source, even if it was based on open source code.

  6. Re:Which license? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

    So... the linked article says the Kumo search team (the ones who develop the FS) USE open source. But I can nowhere see that the FS is released as open source. A citation would be good, especially since the used license would be quit important.

    You should check your glasses and re-RTFA. Two points there:

    1) The Kumo search team did not develop the FS. They've used the one Apache Hadoop (guess the license).

    2) The Kumo search team have implemented a BigTable analog on top of Hadoop FS, and that's what they've open sourced. The result is a subproject of Hadoop now (again, guess the license).

    Also, this isn't obvious from TFA itself, but looking at the sources that it references, this is really old news: the blog post they link to is from 2007. It is also before Powerset was bought by Microsoft (that happened in 2008), so the relevance of all this to Microsoft policies is unclear.