Michael Stonebraker

Discussion of the views of database management pioneer Mike Stonebraker. Related subjects include:

June 18, 2007

Mike Stonebraker on financial stream processing

After my call with Truviso and blog post referencing same, I had the chance to discuss stream processing with Mike Stonebraker, who among his many other distinctions is also StreamBase’s Founder/CTO. We focused almost exclusively on the financial trading market. Here are some of the highlights. Read more

March 24, 2007

Mike Stonebraker explains column-store data compression

The following is by Mike Stonebraker, CTO of Vertica Systems, copyright 2007, as part of our ongoing discussion of data compression. My comments are in a separate post.

Row Store Compression versus Column Store Compression

I Introduction

There are three aspects of space requirements, which we discuss in this short note, namely:

structural space requirements

index space requirements

attribute space requirements.

Read more

January 23, 2007

Arguments AGAINST data warehouse appliances

Data warehouse appliance opponents like to argue that history is conclusively on their side. Database machine maker Britton-Lee, eventually bought by Teradata, fizzled. LISP machines were a spectacular failure. Rational Software’s origins as a special-purpose Ada machine maker had to be renounced before the company could succeed.

But the true story is more mixed. Teradata continues to this day as a major data warehouse technology player, and as far as I’m concerned Teradata indeed makes appliances. If we look further than the applications stack, we find that appliances actually occupy a large and growing share of the computing market. So a persuasive anti-appliance argument has to do more than just invoke the names of Britton-Lee and Symbolics.

I just ran across an article by MIT professor Samuel Madden that attempts to make such a case. And his MIT colleague Mike Stonebraker made similar arguments to me a few days ago. They are not wholly unbiased; indeed, both are involved in Vertica Systems. With that caveat, they have an interesting three-part argument:

Read more

January 22, 2007

Are row-oriented RDBMS obsolete?

If Mike Stonebraker is to be believed, the era of columnar data stores is upon us.

Whether or not you buy completely into Mike’s claims, there certainly are cool ideas in his latest columnar offering, from startup Vertica Systems. The Vertica corporate site offers little detail, but Mike tells me that the product’s architecture closely resembles that of C-Store, which is described in this November, 2005 paper.

The core ideas behind Vertica’s product are as follows. Read more

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