In the era of cloud computing, map/reduce, dynamic languages and the semantic web, the stalwart Relational Database Management System is looking a bit fusty. But RDBMSes were perhaps the earliest widely-deployed example of many of the techniques of distributed computing, concurrent programming, and query optimization that are still highly relevant.
Hellerstein, Stonebraker and Hamilton have published a monograph on Architecture of a Database System. With names like that involved you'd expect high quality and some deep insight, and the article delivers. It's a good, accesible summary of the state-of-the-art in RDBMS technology.
Thursday, 1 May 2008
JAQL pegs the cool technology mashup meter
JAQL is a query language and engine which has XQuery-like syntax, SQL-like operators, JSON as a native data format, and runs using the Hadoop ma/preduce framework. (Although not mentioned explicitly, it's probably great for social networking as well...)
You might think that JAQL and JEQL were separated at birth, but they actually have no genetic material in common. But it's interesting to see the J*QL acronym space being rapidly populated. The best two vowels are now gone - who's going to be next to pile in?
You might think that JAQL and JEQL were separated at birth, but they actually have no genetic material in common. But it's interesting to see the J*QL acronym space being rapidly populated. The best two vowels are now gone - who's going to be next to pile in?