Stonebraker: Send Relational DBMSs to the Home for Tired Software
Mike Stonebraker spoke today at SIGMOD (see Tweetstream) where, among other things there was a 40-year anniversary celebration of the relational DBMS and, in what I suspect is non-coincidental timing, Mike did a post on the CACM site entitled The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us).
Excerpt:
His key argument is all about performance: in any given use-case, Stonebraker thinks RDBMSs can be beaten by about a factor of 50.
- In data warehousing he says a column store wins by 50x
- In OLTP he says a memory-resident DBMS wins by 50x
- For scientific data, he says a DBMS specialized for the job can win by 50x
- For RDF, he says column stores do a reasonable job and is confident that specialized RDF triple stores will do better, i.e., 50x or more. (I'd add that at MarkLogic we think we do a reasonable job as well.)
- For text, he points out that no major search engine uses a relational database so they didn't even qualify for consideration.
- For XML, he cites a private report I sent him a while back done for one of our customers comparing MarkLogic performance to a relational DBMS. When on "our turf," we usually win by no less than 10x and sometimes 100x or more. Sometimes, queries are not even processable in an RDBMS and/or need to be hand-optimized and hand-joined between a DBMS and a search engine.
He reduces to three cases how special-purpose DBMS vendors get their advantage:
- A non-relational data model
- A different implementation of tables
- A different implementation of transactions
We're in the first category, using XML as our data model instead of a table. It's a great post. Check it out and check out the cited references as well.
