Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Posted at 9:16am Permalink Comments (View)
Cloud Database Standards Panel at Glue Conference
In January I wrote a post saying that we need a standard for cloud databases. That post is now the #2 search result on google for “cloud database standards” and there are still no results that even hint at emerging standards. So it will be fun today to moderate a panel on this topic at the Glue Conference with Alex Iskold and Stu Charlton. I am planning on a lot of audience participation as there are a lot of technical folks at the conference. Here are some of the questions I am planning to cover:
- What exactly is a cloud database?
- Do we really need these? There is a recent paper which compares Map Reduce performance with parallel relational databases and finds the latter to perform 3-5x faster and require less code.
- What about the approach pursued by Drizzle? Can’t we hang on to SQL that way?
- What about key value stores? Those seem all the rage right now.
- Is the need for cloud databases all about performance or is it also about ease of development?
- Why do we need standards? Is portability really important? Who has migrated their current relational db ever? Is it learning curve?
- Is there a native data format for the cloud? Is it XML? Is it JSON? Something else?
- In the cloud, how will “things” be identified (certainly not autoincrement ID column)?
- Why do we need all these separate query languages? FBQL, YQL, XQuery, SimpleDB queries, …
- How does this relate to IP and licensing? SQL was invented by IBM in early 70s and not standardized until the mid 80s.
- Any candidates for a cloud database standard?
If anyone has others questions they would like to see discussed (and are not at the conference), just add them as a comment. Also, of course, any answers to the questions above would be great as comments.
