Renowned DBMS leaders (including DeWitt and Stonebraker) just published a paper in which they contrast the DBMS magnum opus and the green-ish, increasingly popular MapReduce paradigm. This work will be presented at SIGMOD in a couple of months. Before then, you can get a sneak preview here.

Andrew Pavlo, Erik Paulson, Alexander Rasin, Daniel J. Abadi, David J. Dewitt, Samuel Madden, and Michael Stonebraker, “A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis,” in SIGMOD 2009: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference, July 2009 (Providence, RI)

Back on January 2008, DeWitt and Stonebraker made some waves with their op-ed titled “MapReduce, a major step backwards”. This new paper offers far more nuanced claims, with the benefit of empirical data.

Without venturing into oversimplifying such claims, I was struck by observations such as: “we were impressed by how easy Hadoop was to set up and use in comparison to the databases” and “extensibility was another area where we found the database systems we tested lacking”.

May a constructive tussle benefit both camps, as there seems to be work left at either side, regardless of how long a journey they have been in. Plus, there will be hybrid forms.

In practical terms, I expect that DBMS and MapReduce will continue to exhibit very different TCO models and thus will be quite easy to set apart for a given use case (with the caveat that one’s own TCO model will be different).

I couldn’t wait to try Wolfram’s new creation. Today, it opened up to the public. In no time, I could figure out just how many days I lived and could plot some pesky functions. Really cool. In the next iteration, I hope it will be possible to plug a query to this “computational knowledge engine” (their definition and TM) in the midst of a complex workflow, whether it’s a Map/Reduce one or even a venerable Unix pipe.

So, is this what 1st commander Mr. Spock queries at work …

We all speculated that the launch of the Skype application for the iPhone would be hot, but not this hot. The free downloads came in at an average clip of ~6 downloads per second. I give another high five to my Skype colleagues who can proudly add this new mind boggling record to their collection (and to the 1 Billion downloads of the Skype client since inception; some other Skype facts here).

The Skype nation is a fitting product of the new world that we live in. It has taken only 2 years for Facebook to hit the 50M audience mark. Contrast that with Radio and TV hitting the same mark after 38 years and 13 years respectively. I learned about these and other factoids in this cool video:

I will admit that I cherish my 6-character-only Skype ID. It dates me as an early Skype adopter (’twas 2004). Much like my parents were proud owners of a 4 digit phone number easy to operate on the rotary dial. Long life to Skype.

Addendum: Downloads are now (4/7/09) well past 2M. Last update on subject.

Researchers have fabricated a MD5 collision (different message, same hash) and then enacted a practical exploitation by way of a rogue Certification Authority cert. It has been a while that the community has known that MD5 is long in the tooth. When we wrote the standard for securing SANs over IP protocols (RFC3723), we were already warned of MD5 vulnerabilities and steered clear of MD5 as much as we could help it.

Intriguingly, these researchers have executed their crypto algorithms on a cluster of 200 playstation 3. In their use case, a playstation 3 is deemed to yield 40 times the work of a single core general-purpose processor.