
Trinity - Distributed Graph Database from Microsoft Research - LiveTheDream
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trinity/
======
nopal
So many cool things come from Microsoft that lack the story and passion of
some of the more well-known open source projects. It's truly disappointing.

~~~
_ques
You want a story, here's a passionate story!

MSR Asia is based in Beijing and is one of the fastest growing research
outfits in the world. They're slowly showing up all over the place in the CS
world, and this is just one of the examples.

Consider Microsoft Academic Search. It BLOWS AWAY Google Scholar, Citeseer
etc. in terms of features. Once they attain coverage parity, there is reason
to use anything else.

Academic Search, Trinity, and similar projects out of MSR Asia seem to be
directly having impact in Bing. In a matter of a short few years, you're
looking at a barebones search engine (Live.com) building an R&D
infrastructure, with prototypes, and production modules feeding into what is
now a pretty rocking search engine. [Example of Academic search integration
with Bing: <http://www.bing.com/search?q=donald+knuth> , scroll to bottom --
page also shows Freebase integration in middle]

Ironically, Microsoft is playing David in the David vs Goliath story here, and
the passion is showing in terms of the ecosystem of computing projects and
products that are making it into Bing.

If you want to look outside of Bing, consider the Kinect effort. Did you know
that the _hardware_ ships with mathemetical models built at MSR, trained using
Dryad? (Dryad is an MapReduce competitor out of MSR) The training is the
"secret sauce" and why you don't have to spend days calibrating the Kinect.

None of this is privileged information -- you just have to follow the
hyperlinks :) The open source world is built on collaboration and sharing, and
hence the "story" is the backbone of most work. But that doesn't mean other
people don't have stories and passion!

~~~
mhansen
Searching <http://www.bing.com/search?q=donald+knuth>, I see the freebase
integration, but I don't see anything other than search results and ads at the
bottom of the page. What am I looking for?

~~~
_ques
See: <http://i.imgur.com/efj7m.png>

"Data provided by MS Academic Search"

~~~
mhansen
Strange - that didn't appear for me.

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shriphani
MSR might just be the bell labs of this century! They already employ Tony
Hoare (Quicksort), Niraj Kayal (the K in AKS), Simon Jones (GHC). What a heady
list!

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vmind
This looks very interesting, although it seems like they are relying on a very
high speed network to get around the latency issues inherent in sharding a
graph database. (They mention partitioning, but not whether it occurs online).

Related, my Third Year project is a graph database that loads its data lazily
from configurable back ends (databases, caches, APIs, written in Clojure). Now
I have more evidence for my dissertation that this kind of tech is useful.

I wonder what their language for queries is going to look like, the only main
graph language I've found is Gremlin, which used to be XQuery derived, but
recently switched to chained objects.

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al_james
This looks great. I wonder if its usable for real-time (low latency) queries?
Looks a bit batch oriented to me.

Also, is this open source? Can I download and play?

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joshu
What is the point? Show us the code or shut up.

~~~
iamelgringo
Respectfully, Josh. Comments like this really don't help the conversation much
here at HN.

~~~
joshu
It's a company talking about an internal tech (in comparison to another
company's internal tech, no less.) They didn't release it. It is completely
useless from a hacker's POV.

I stand by my comment.

Also, my name isn't Josh.

~~~
iamelgringo
I apologize about the name shortening. As I said, no disrespect intended.

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rbanffy
Is there a download link somewhere? Couldn't find it.

BTW, will it run on Linux?

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udoprog
Buzzword BINGO!

