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.
