[HN Gopher] Making Databases Work: The Pragmatic Wisdom of Micha...
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Making Databases Work: The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker
(2018)
Author : wallflower
Score : 93 points
Date : 2020-06-15 19:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| dang wrote:
| The pdf: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3226595
| epberry wrote:
| Legend... worked on his ideas at Vertica, the commercial version
| of C store. Really formative experience.
| dang wrote:
| Please say more!
| epberry wrote:
| I worked on the memory allocator for a feature called Flex
| Tables - https://www.vertica.com/docs/9.2.x/HTML/Content/Auth
| oring/Fl... which involved loading unstructured data into the
| column store database. I worked with two incredible engineers
| (who I believe were sniped by Facebook later). One was a
| distributed systems expert who spent the entire summer on and
| off debugging a multi-server crash where the root cause and
| failure occurred 30 minutes apart. When he finally crushed it
| I went outside for lunch that day and he was sitting in a
| lawn chair on this corporate office drinking a beer and
| staring in to the distance. I had this feeling that he was
| untouchable and alone in the universe that day, having
| conquered a mountain few people will ever climb.
|
| The second guy more or less taught me how to use Vim. And not
| just use it, but move buffers around and navigate the
| filesystem so fast that it seemed he was wired directly into
| the computer. Up to that point I had not worked with a very
| very experienced programmer who was still practicing. He
| would write very complex regexes directly in the vim prompt
| to find the right parts of log files.
|
| The overall team had been acquired by HP 18 months before I
| arrived and you could tell that people were beginning to move
| along. However many of the folks there had worked with
| Stonebreaker at MIT and then at C store. There was a feeling
| that they all knew things about column store databases that
| were not widely known. In particular the engineering manager
| once walked us through the very first project he implemented
| at Vertica, which was backup and restore. He more or less
| derived the whole system from a few principles of when data
| should be saved over the course of 2 hours.
|
| It was an extremely technical place to work with data sizes
| and problems I had never encountered. It gave me a sense of
| the the sheer scale that some companies operated at and what
| was possible by starting with C++ and building the system out
| bit by bit over years. Many of the approaches there actually
| mirrored architecture work I did later on a multi-camera
| tracking system.
| scott_s wrote:
| I found his chapters "Where good ideas come from and how to
| exploit them"
| (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3226595.3226608) and "Where
| we have failed"
| (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3226595.3226609) particularly
| insightful. A thread running through both is make sure you're
| working on problems that people actually have.
|
| Much of the chapter on where we failed is about problems in the
| academic system itself. He has some proposed solutions, but I
| don't know how effective (or realistic) they are. I also don't
| have easily expressible solutions myself.
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| Another great read that was a collaboration of Stonebreaker,
| Joseph Hellerstein, and Peter Ballis is the RED (Readings in
| databases) book. It's been around for a while, and was updated
| just a few years ago - http://www.redbook.io/
| wenc wrote:
| I read the Red Book when I was figuring out data architectures
| for my company. (the other book was Designing Data-Intensive
| Archictures by Martin Kleppmann)
|
| Stonebraker et al are very opinionated (especially about SQL
| and relational databases), but in a way I can accept because a
| lot of his thinking is based on first-principles. Stonebraker
| also has a string of database successes (Ingres, Postgres,
| Vertica etc.) which gives him enough street cred to prove he's
| not just spewing theory from an ivory tower. He's not
| necessarily correct in every opinion, but his opinions are
| interesting and worth considering. I enjoyed his talk on "Why
| Big Data is at least 4 different problems"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRcecxdGxvQ
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| I generally tend to agree that he can be extremely
| opinionated especially these days. A lot of his opinions
| being on first-principles helps, though some of those have
| evolved a bit over the year. The red book in particular I
| appreciate because it wasn't solely Stonebreaker but rather a
| collaboration. My understanding is the updated version there
| was a bit of back and forth on some of those things about re-
| writing history or being overly opinionated on certain things
| that were a bit one sided vs. a balanced view. The end result
| ended up nice and balanced, but it was in large part because
| it was a work of 3 very knowledgable people in the space.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Added to that he runs commercial companies and continues to
| do so based on database technologies. I'd rather take an
| opinionated answer from someone of his caliber (Turing award
| + running successful commercial companies based on the same
| tech).
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