On: Parallel DBMSs faster than MapReduce

[gaius]

Also, parallel DBMSs don't handle failure well.

It depends on the type of failure. You can simply skip offline partitions, for example.

PS The paper is coauthored by Microsoft.

Microsoft were doing shared-nothing clustering on SQL Server LONG before MySQL types had even coined the word sharding to mean the same thing...

[andr → gaius]

Microsoft were doing shared-nothing clustering on SQL Server LONG before MySQL types had even coined the word sharding to mean the same thing...

Microsoft are heavily invested in SQL Server, so they are biased against MapReduce.

[gaius → andr]

Microsoft are heavily invested in SQL Server, so they are biased against MapReduce.

Microsoft is a huge company and parts of it a biased in favour of things like this (e.g. the bits working on F#)

[eob → gaius]

The paper was co-authored by David DeWitt, not Microsoft. DeWitt is a well-known database researcher from Wisconsin. And Microsoft, despite their awful history of business practices, pours tons of funding into really good quality research (via MSR).

I'm not saying people aren't biased by their associations -- certainly, the traditional DBMS community feels like they have to defend their research & products against new techniques like MapReduce.. but if you're going to criticize the paper, criticize it because you found flaws in its contents, not because of the organization listed beneath an author.