Monday, October 19, 2009

Hadoop discussions at Microsoft Research

I was invited to present a talk about Hadoop File System Architecture at Microsoft Research at Seattle. This is a research group and is focussed on long-term research, so it is no surprise that they are interested in knowing how a growing company like Facebook is using Hadoop to its advantage.

I met a few folks who chatted with me about how Microsoft SQL Server is being modified to handle large scala databases. These folks heartily agreed with a comment I made in my presentation that Dr. Dewitt and Dr. Stonebraker is missing the point when they are comparing performance numbers between Hadoop with traditional Database systems.... rather than comparing the scalability and fault-tolerance of these systems. I had learned some of the fundamentals of Database systems from Professor Dewitt during my graduate studies at Uiversity of Wisconsin Madison, but Dr Dewitt is a Microsoft employee now!

The fact that Facebook uses the SQL interface of Hive layered over Hadoop makes it even more interesting to Microsoft. They wanted to know the performance difference between Hive and PIG and would like to compare them to their distributed-SQL-Server software.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation.

2 comments:

  1. I know many computer engineers that have had so many problems with SQL. Microsoft is having a lot of problems with many of its applications although Windows 7 is a respectable OS contrarily to Vista. Viagra Generic Viagra

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