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Comment by JeffDClark | Hacker News Reader

Is this the talk that you are referring to? http://slideshot.epfl.ch/play/suri_stonebraker

Note that Stonebraker makes some good points, but there are many ways to build scalability and Stonebraker is too fast to dismiss many.

In particular, his criticism of traditional databases seems based more on philosophy rather than evidence.

I'd advise reading both sides of the story:

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2009/09/16/relational-databas...

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2009/07/03/column-stores-and-...

http://architects.dzone.com/articles/stonebraker-talk-trigge...

http://gigaom.com/2011/07/11/amazons-werner-vogels-on-the-st...

http://dom.as/2011/07/08/stonebraker-trapped/

The date on some of those posts in interesting. 2009 is quite a while ago now, and I'd suggest that columnar datastores haven't exactly taken over. Some implementations have made some progress (eg Cassandra), but OTOH many non-traditional datastores have added traditional-database like features (eg, Facebook's SQL front end on their NoSQL system), and traditional databases have added NoSQL features too.

Stonebraker is a very smart person but he's also not shy about promoting his own companies/research. You generally get a well-informed but very opinionated take on things from him.

VoltDB, for example, is good for certain complex workloads over large but not-too-large data sets. For a lot of situations it isn't really an alternative to memcache+MySQL or a NoSQL solution.

If I may drool a little, you guys represent the heart of Hacker News. Insightful summary, mentioning that somewhere somebody gave such a talk. As I was reading the first comment I was silently cheering for "a librarian's follow-up", and there it was!

Yes, that's the one. Thank you! I'm bookmarking it right now.

The log mechanism Prof. Stonebraker prefers, command logging vs ARIES, almost all newer data stores use command logging w/checkpoints (i.e., redis, mongo) and ship changes to other nodes similarly.

After running a large production redis environment, having a large redo log makes startup/recovery painful. I'm not convinced command logging is the most efficient in all scenarios especially when doing counters where the command is more verbose than the resulting change.

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