“Isn’t it ironic that in 2016 a non-skilled user can find a web page from Google’s untold petabytes of data in millisecond time, but a highly trained SQL expert can’t do the same thing in a relational database one billionth the size?.–Jim Starkey.

I have interviewed Jim Starkey. A database legend, Jim’s career as an entrepreneur, architect, and innovator spans more than three decades of database history.

RVZ

Q1. In your opinion, what are the most significant advances in databases in the last few years?

Jim Starkey: I’d have to say the “atom programming model” where a database is layered on a substrate of peer-to-peer replicating distributed objects rather than disk files. The atom programming model enables scalability, redundancy, high availability, and distribution not available in traditional, disk-based database …

“Leading enterprises have a firm grasp of the technology edge that’s relevant to them. Better data analysis and disambiguation through semantics is central to how they gain competitive advantage today.”–Alan Morrison.

I have interviewed Alan Morrison, senior research fellow at PwC, Center for Technology and Innovation.
Main topic of the interview is how the Big Data market is evolving.

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Q1. How do you see the Big Data market evolving? 

Alan Morrison: We should note first of all how true Big Data and analytics methods emerged and what has been disruptive. Over the course of a decade, web companies have donated IP and millions of lines of code that serves as the foundation for what’s being built on top.  In the …

“HBase and Hadoop are the only technologies proven to scale to dozens of petabytes on commodity servers, currently being used by companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Adobe and Salesforce.com.”–Monte Zweben.

Is it possible to turn Hadoop into a RDBMS? On this topic, I have interviewed Monte Zweben, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Splice Machine.

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Q1. What are the main challenges of applications and operational analytics that support real-time, interactive queries on data updated in real-time for Big Data?

Monte Zweben: Let’s break down “real-time, interactive queries on data updated in real-time for Big Data”. “Real-time, interactive queries” means that results need to be returned in milliseconds to a few seconds.
For “Data updated in real-time” to happen, …

“There are four things that motivate open source development teams:
1. The challenge/puzzle of programming, 2. Need for the software, 3. Personal advancement, 4. Belief in open source” — Bruce Momjian.

On PostgreSQL and the challenges of motivating and managing open source teams, I have interviewed Bruce Momjian, Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB, and Co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and Core Contributor.

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Q1. How did you manage to transform PostgreSQL from an abandoned academic project into a commercially viable, now enterprise relational database?

Bruce Momjian: Ever since I was a developer of database …

“Many tools now exist to run database software without installing software. From vagrant boxes, to one click cloud install, to a cloud service that doesn’t require any installation, developer ease of use has always been a path to storage platform success.”–Brian Bulkowski.

The fifth interview in the “Big Data: three questions to “ series of interviews, is with Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike co-founder and CTO.

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Q1. What is your current product offering?

Brian Bulkowski: Aerospike is the first in-memory NoSQL database optimized for flash or solid state drives (SSDs).
In-memory for speed and NoSQL for scale. Our approach to memory is unique – we have built our own file system to access …

“The most valuable thing I’ve learned in this role is that judicious use of a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. I’ve seen colleagues and other companies get caught up in the “Big Data” craze by spend hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling on a Hadoop cluster that sees a few megabytes [...]

” One of the biggest challenges with any project of such a long duration is coping with change. There are many aspects to coping with change, including changes in requirements, changes in technology, vendor stability, changes in staffing and so on”–Jon Brumfitt. On May 14, 2009, the European Space Agency launched an Arianne 5 rocket [...]

“We went down the path of building Oracle NoSQL database because of explicit request from some of our largest Oracle Berkeley DB installations that wanted to move away from maintaining home grown sharding implementations and very much wanted an out of box technology that can replicate the robustness of what they had built “out of [...]

“Application designers need to start by thinking about what level of data integrity they need, rather than what they want, and then design their technology stack around that reality. Everyone would like a database that guarantees perfect availability, perfect consistency, instantaneous response times, and infinite throughput, but it´s not possible to create a product with [...]

“Some people even think that “Hadoop” and “Big Data” are synonymous (though this is an over-characterization). Unfortunately, Hadoop was designed based on a paper by Google in 2004 which was focused on use cases involving unstructured data (e.g. extracting words and phrases from Webpages in order to create Google’s Web index). Since it was not [...]