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.

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.