
Embedded Python/NumPy in MonetDB - espeed
https://www.monetdb.org/blog/embedded-pythonnumpy-monetdb
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RyanHamilton
Pushing calculations to the database is a great idea, good to see it gaining
more traction. Too often people pull back "all" the data just to iterate it
locally.

I looked at MonetDB as part of researching column databases in general. It was
as fast as the commercial databases on some queries, I was really impressed.
The main thing that put me off was that you couldn't seem to nudge data layout
/ the query optimizer to do exactly what you specify. They seemed to have the
idea of an all-knowing system that would optimize for you, perhaps as a
research idea that works but for commercial use it worried me too much.

For anyone interested in column databases in general I put this list of
comparisons together: [http://www.timestored.com/time-series-data/column-
oriented-d...](http://www.timestored.com/time-series-data/column-oriented-
databases)

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brynedwards
The list seems out of date, InfiniDB has been open-sourced since Calpont went
bankrupt, and Greenplum is open-sourced under Apache 2 license[1]. There's
also MariaDB Columnstore, a fork of InfiniDB[2].

1\. [http://greenplum.org/](http://greenplum.org/)

2\. [https://mariadb.com/products/mariadb-
columnstore](https://mariadb.com/products/mariadb-columnstore)

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maxpert
Is anyone using MonetDB production? How does it compare to other column
stores?

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trengrj
You can do this in Greenplum too.

I've always liked the idea of moving general compute to the database, but
usually in an organisation the databases are pretty tightly locked away and it
becomes a pain to get the right versions of your libraries installed.

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tingletech
I've never hear of this database, but it looks sort of interesting.

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assface
It's over 15 years old.

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Xorlev
Still, it suffers from a lack of visibility. I'd only heard about it because
one of our DB vendors in the past had mentioned integrating with it.

That said, it's had a lot of interesting development in the last few years
(e.g. ocelot which tries to hardware accelerate operations via OpenCL).

