Michael Stonebraker is a DB guru — over 30 years of experience with database technologies. He started with Ingres (and the open source PostgreSQL) developed at UC Berkeley, he taught at UC Berkeley, is currently an adjunct professor of computer science at MIT, and is an expert on “federated database and stream-processing markets”. Stonebraker was recently interviewed for the ACM Queue by Margo Seltzer, co-founder of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, now owned by Oracle.
A couple of good quotes from the interview:
“If I want to be able to read and write a data element in less than a millisecond, there is no possible way that I can do that from an application program to any one of the elephant databases, because you have to do a process switch, a message to get into their systems. You’ve got to have an embedded database, or you lose.”
“In the stream processing market, the only kinds of databases that make any sense are ones that are embedded. With all the other types, the latency is just too high.”
“C++ and C# are really big, hard languages with all kinds of stuff in them. I’m a huge fan of little languages, such as PHP and Python.”
“Look at a language such as Ruby on Rails. It has been extended to have database capabilities built into the language. You don’t make a call out to SQL; you say, “for E in employee do” and language constructs and variables are used for database access. It makes for a much easier programming job.”
“Let’s look at Ruby on Rails again. It does not look like SQL. If you do clean extensions of interesting languages, those aren’t SQL and they look nothing like SQL. So I think SQL could well go away.”
ceo