Database People Hating on MapReduce
David DeWitt writes in the Database Column that MapReduce is a major step backwards:
Listening to databasers and map reducers talk is like eavesdropping on your average family holiday mashup. Every holiday people who have virtually nothing in common are thrown together because they incidentally share a little DNA or are married to the shared DNA. In desperation everyone gravitates to some shared enemy they can all confidently bash. But after that moment is relieved and awkward silence once again looms, nothing is left but more drinking and tackling sensitive topics you just know will end badly.
Database folks love their schemas, relational purity and their swiss army knife indexes. You soon learn that really map reduce is just another form of an index and indexes really can scale to any heights with just a little tweaking. Map reducers lover their pure functional models, their self-healing clustery filled ecosystems, and the shear joy of the semi-organized chaos of letting a 10,000 CPUs simultaneously bloom.
I for one stand firmly by the relish tray. Transactions have a place and so does structured data. That's why Google contributes heavily to MySQL. Yet, I too like my map reduce engine, distributed file system combo platter. With map reduce I can implement any complex behavior over any data set. With enough machines that work can be performed in a predictable amount of time. You aren't limit to set logic, SQL types, and tweaked indexes. That's pretty good stuff too.
Much like a staunchly conservative nail crunching father and his too soft pansy liberal son, these two camps will never understand each other. Every sign of beauty in one person's eyes is just another confirmation to the other side of impending senility. Why even try? Just hug in a manly way and agree to meet again next year.
