Around Database

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For half a century, Stonebraker has been churning out the database designs at a furious pace. The Turing Award winner made his early mark with Ingres and Postgres. However, apparently not content to having created what would become the world’s most popular database (PostgreSQL), he also created Vertica, Tamr, and VoltDB, among others. His latest endeavor: inverting the entire computing paradigm with the Database-Oriented Operating System (DBOS).

Stonebraker also is famous for his frank assessments of databases and the data processing industry. He’s been known to pop some bubbles and slay a sacred cow or two. When Hadoop was at the peak of its popularity in 2014, Stonebraker took clear joy in pointing out that Google (the source of the tech) had already moved away from MapReduce to something else: BigTable.

That’s not to say Stonebraker is a big supporter of NoSQL tech. In fact, he’s been a relentless champion for the power of the relational data model and SQL, the two core tenets of relational database management systems, for many years.

Back in 2005, Stonebraker and two of his students, Peter Bailis and Joe Hellerstein, analyzed the previous 40 years of database design and shared their findings in a paper called “Readings in Database Systems.”(http://www.redbook.io). In it, they concluded that the relational model and SQL emerged as the best choice for a database management system, having out-battled other ideas, including hierarchical file systems, object-oriented databases, and XML databases, among others.

n his new paper, “What Goes Around Comes Around…And Around…,”(https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-sigmodrec2024.pdf) which was published in the June 2024 edition of SIGMOD Record, the legendary MIT computer scientist and his writing partner, Carnegie Mellon University’s Andrew Pavlo, analyze the past 20 years of database design. As they note, “A lot has happened in the world of databases since our 2005 survey.”

While some of the database tech that has been invented since 2005 is good and helpful and will last for some time, according to Stonebraker and Pavlo, much of the new stuff is not helpful, is not good, and will only exist in niche markets.