From: TK

To: Editor

Date: 31 Jan 2005

 

From a quick one-page marketing "article":

 

Relational databases are one to two orders of magnitude too slow.

--Michael Stonebreaker, quoted in Data on the Fly, Forbes

 

The quote is directly from the company's owner who "...created two well-known relational database systems, Ingres and Postgres." Further from the reporter:

 

Unlike traditional database programs, Streambase analyzes data without storing it to disk, performing queries on data as it flows.

 

Hmmm... didn't know that the Relational Model of Data specifically proscribed in-memory implementations.

 

 

From: Fabian Pascal

To: TK

 

Nothing new as far as nonsense goes. These are the people who fail to design true RDBMSs, then have the nerve to turn around and complain that RDBMSs perform badly, and develop new non-RDBMSs, who purportedly perform better because they are not relational, while in reality, performance has nothing to do with the model and everything to do with the implementation. Whatever prevented them from building in-memory RDBMSs?

 

Ed. Note: The reporter should have asked Informix/IBM whatever happened to Illustra, the product that Stonebraker was pushing before Streambase with similar rhetoric. Beware of academics with business interests.

 

 

Posted 03/11/05