You said: As bayareaguy noted: "You have to read the original article very closely or you'll miss their point: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards."
This to me is really funny since I don't think you can view MapReduce as distributed database research. I haven't used it, and while I admit that I might have gotten it all wrong, to me its a library/dsl/paradigm/technique for parallelization of certain data-processing tasks. So to me that statement makes as much sense as "lisp, viewed as a monitor , is a step backward compared to lcds".
Also, while it was a while since i viewed the techtalk on bigtable, and I really agree BigTable is a column-based DBMS, I can't seem to remember that they built it to get around deficiencies in MapReduce, I understood it as a compliment. BUT it might have been much more constructive if, as someone said higher up, they wrote the original article about BigTable, because I do believe that their criticism is actually valid (as in apples vs apples) in some cases regarding BigTable.
This to me is really funny since I don't think you can view MapReduce as distributed database research. I haven't used it, and while I admit that I might have gotten it all wrong, to me its a library/dsl/paradigm/technique for parallelization of certain data-processing tasks. So to me that statement makes as much sense as "lisp, viewed as a monitor , is a step backward compared to lcds".
Others, that I consider smart, have noticed http://bitworking.org/news/288/Stonebraker-on-MapReduce
Also, while it was a while since i viewed the techtalk on bigtable, and I really agree BigTable is a column-based DBMS, I can't seem to remember that they built it to get around deficiencies in MapReduce, I understood it as a compliment. BUT it might have been much more constructive if, as someone said higher up, they wrote the original article about BigTable, because I do believe that their criticism is actually valid (as in apples vs apples) in some cases regarding BigTable.