Ravi Pandya
ravi@iecommerce.com
www.iecommerce.com
+1 425 417 4180
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2007 11 10

2004 10 09 08 07 06

2003 04 02 01

2002 12 11 10 09 08

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ABOUT ME

Ravi Pandya
Architect
Cloud Computing Futures
Microsoft
ravip at microsoft.com

03-	Microsoft
00-02	Covalent
97-00	EverythingOffice
96-97	Jango
93-96	NetManage
89-93	Xanadu
88-89	Hypercube
84,85	Xerox PARC
83-89	University of Toronto, Math
86-87	George Brown College, Dance
95-	Foresight Institute
97-	Institute for Molecular Manufacturing

DISCLAIMER

The opinions expressed here are purely my own, and do not reflect the policy of my employer.

What They Said

The question raised by the Dynamo paper is answered here: Michael Stonebraker, Pat Helland, et al say it's the end of architectural era in databases, and it's time for a complete rewrite. In an earlier paper, Stonebraker said that special-purpose databases would be faster than general-purpose DBs for specialized tasks like stream queries. Now he's saying (and showing) that a general purpose database can be solidly trounced (82x perf on TPC benchmarks!) by a database optimized for current systems architectures. H-store has:

• Single threading, small transactions, in memory operation
• Shared nothing, with hot standby for high availability
• Application logic "in process" to avoid protocol overhead
• Data partitioning instead of locking for transactions

They work through a taxonomy of application schemas and map them to this model. Typical business apps follow a constrained tree schema (orders, order lines, etc.) which maps very well, and then there are soem interesting variations. H-store can precompile query/update plans, conflict analysis, etc. based on a static schema.

There are a number of interesting issues still to research - schema evolution, rebalancing, etc. But this is a very promising direction.

07:17 #