(2008-01-21) Stonebraker Vs Mapreduce

Michael Stonebraker thinks Map Reduce is a step backwards from the RDBMS world. Lots of people have called BullShit on him. A couple interesting specific bits are:

• What the authors really want to gripe about is distributed "cloud" data management systems like Amazon's SimpleDB; in fact if you change "Map Reduce" to "SimpleDB" the original article almost makes sense.

• According to the article the Map Reduce style is being backported into the universities so grads be can be trained up... I recall Yahoo staff stating that available skills are an issue for leveraging Hadoop/HFS. So a complete rewrite isn't enough; an entire generation of developers and data specialists have to be trained up on this paradigm; another generation has to be convinced otherwise that an RDBMS is the only serious option for data management. Conceivably the result parallel model becomes as dominant a paradigm for data processing for the next 20 years as RDBMS/SQL has been for the last 20, but who knows.