Daniel Abadi on Kickfire and related subjects
Daniel Abadi has a new blog, whose first post centers around Kickfire. The money quote is (emphasis mine):
In order for me to get excited about Kickfire, I have to ignore Mike Stonebraker’s voice in my head telling me that DBMS hardware companies have been launched many times in the past are ALWAYS fail (the main reasoning is that Moore’s law allows for commodity hardware to catch up in performance, eventually making the proprietary hardware overpriced and irrelevant). But given that Moore’s law is transforming into increased parallelism rather than increased raw speed, maybe hardware DBMS companies can succeed now where they have failed in the past
Good point.
More generally, Abadi speculates about the market for MySQL-compatible data warehousing. My responses include:
- OF COURSE there are many MySQL users who need to move to a serious analytic DBMS.
- What’s less clear is whether there’s any big advantage to those users in remaining MySQL-compatible when they do move. I’m not sure what MySQL-specific syntax or optimizations they’d have that would be difficult to port to a non-MySQL system.
- It’s nice to see Abadi speaking well of Infobright and its technology.
- To say that Infobright went open source because it was “desperate” is overstated. That said, I don’t think Infobright was on track to prosper without going open source.
- While open source and MySQL go together, an appliance like Kickfire loses many (not all) of the benefits of open source.
- Calpont has indeed never disclosed a customer win. Any year now … (Just kidding, Vogel!)
- In general, seeing Abadi be so favorable toward Vertica competitors adds credibiity to the recent Hadoop vs. DBMS paper.
Anyhow, as previously noted, I’m a big Daniel Abadi fan. I look forward to seeing what else he posts in his blog, and am optimistic he’ll live up to or exceed its stated goals.
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2 Responses to “Daniel Abadi on Kickfire and related subjects”
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Having been a founder of Symbolics, I have already seen commodity hardware run ahead of special-purpose hardware, for the reasons you mention, plus the reason that new software techniques sometimes evolve that make the special hardware unnecessary.
That said, there is still room for some kind of special processing hardware today. The Azul Java machine is an interesting example. The use of GPGPU’s is very promising because they’re made in such quantity, and their speed and quality and price are all being driven by the ever-growing digital game industry.
However, a GPGPU is not promising for database systems, at least not in any very obvious way. It’s good when you have a relatively small amount of data that needs a relatively large amount of computation. Database systems, on the other hand, spend a lot of their effort on moving data around. So at this point I don’t particularly expect GPGPU technology to apply to database systems in any conventional way (although I could imaging special-purpose DBMS’s, that embed a lot of numerics inside the DB, perhaps).
In any case, I think extrapolating forward from the failure of, say, the old Britton-Lee database machine is not a good idea. The balances between components of hardware change rapidly, and as they do, the tradeoffs between what to do in hardware and what to do in software can change just as radically as the tradeoffs between what to do locally (on a client) and what to do remotely (on a server).
It’s a new world out there, since then, and it’s too early to judge simply the concept of “special hardware” per se. It depends on what special hardware, how you’re using it, and so on.
Of course I wish InfoBright the best of success.
Dan,
Actually, Kickfire are the guys with the cool “non-Von-Neumann” super-parallel chip. 🙂
Best,
CAM