Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more | Hacker News Reader

Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more

theregister.com

47 pointsrguiscard13 comments

The Pick OS and its many derivatives had a non-relational database based on hashing at the core of the OS. Very popular a few decades ago but mostly dead now.

I do miss embedded SQL. The mismatch between database types and application language types caused by separating the two leads to lots of boilerplate and subtle bugs and logical inconsistencies.

I've been saying for years that I don't want Windows or MacOS or whatever.

All I really want is a simple OS with a built-in database and shell language for automating stuff with support for scientific computing. Maybe add some basic apps like email and a super simple word processor and text editor. I don't need much though.

IIRC someone has done something similar with emacs running on baremetal a few years ago.

It was dobę. It is Linux

Linux isn't quite right either, but certainly a big improvement

How is it not? You can literally piece together an OS with precisely what you want, and nothing else. Gentoo, Arch, LFS, and NixOS all come to mind, with varying levels of complexity and repeatability.

There's a bit more DIY than I'm ready for from an OS perspective I guess. I'm pretty happy living in the Linux terminal, but configuring every little thing is beyond me at present absent a large amount of effort.

> wants a bare metal os with just a database

> doesn't want to configure it

what.

Lol crazy sounding right? I work at a large company though, so getting IT approval to run my own ground up Gentoo instance is not ever going to fly.

I was just thinking about what other kinds of computing possibilities are...well... possible. And also how much I dislike having this massive Windows API (or whatever) in my way.

As an engineer doing simulations, I really just need a workstation with a few primitives that I wouldn't want to build myself such as matrix routines, optimization solvers, graphics primitives, reports, and file I/O. If some company sold a workstation that glued all of that together in something like a modern C64, you'd have something pretty cool. Sure you can just run various apps on a modern OS...but there is just so much garbage going on there that makes it a pain to do your job (also a lot that makes things easier too of course).

I guess I'm wishing for something like a dedicated computer that's more like a modern lisp machine or smalltalk Xerox Park machine or something for scientists/engineers. None of this will ever happen of course unless I get a trillion dollars and can setup a team to design the hardware and software. I can prob find a better use for that kind of money too ;)

Anyway, just trying to talk about what I think about when I'm cobbling together things. I don't think Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS are very efficient for all needs and it's a bit of a shame when I think of how many scientists are stuck in configuration, software installation, and API hell when what they really need is some kind of super souped-up calculator.

It sounds like what you really want is a Jupyter Notebook, optionally with an RDBMS other than SQLite, and libraries to handle it.

Have you considered running a minimal OS in a container? You can mount a persistent data volume to it. Should even work in Windows, assuming you have access to WSL2, although AFAIK you can’t do GPU pass-through if that matters.

> Databricks is often managing a million-ish Spark-sub tasks for various users. They couldn't do that using traditional operating system scheduling techniques: they needed something that could scale. The obvious answer was to put all scheduling information into a database. That's exactly what the Databricks guys did: they put it all in a PostgreSQL database, and then started whining about Postgres performance," says Stonebrake.

anyone know of a talk/paper discussing this scheduling "hack" in more detail

https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11112

The link is referenced in the article.

Well, you are not remembering this, but in fact exactly this was principle of AS400 platform with DB2.

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