Your Mouse Is a Database (2012)

Summary

March 27, 2012Volume 10, issue 3 PDF Your Mouse is a Database Web and mobile applications are increasingly composed of asynchronous and realtime streaming services and push notifications. Erik Meijer Among the hottest buzzwords in the IT industry these days is "big data," but the "big" is something of a misnomer: big data is not just about volume, but also about velocity and variety:4 • The volume of data ranges from a small number of items stored in the closed world of a conventional RDMS (relational database management system) to a large number of items spread out over a large cluster of machines or across the entire World Wide Web. • The velocity of data ranges from the consumer synchronously pulling data from the source (negative velocity) to the source asynchronously pushing data to its clients (positive velocity), at different speeds, ranging from millisecond-latency push-based streams of stock quotes to reference data pulled by an application from a central repository once a month. • The variety of data ranges from SQL-style relational tuples with foreign-/primary-key relationships to coSQL-style objects or graphs with key-value pointers, or even binary data such as videos and music. If we draw a picture of the design space for big data along these three dimensions of volume, velocity, and variety, then we get the big-data cube shown in figure 1. Each of the eight corners of the cube corresponds to a (well-known) database technology. For example, the traditional RDMS is at the top-back corner with coordinates (small, pull, fk/pk), meaning that the data sets are small; it assumes a closed world that is under full control by the database, clients synchronously pull rows out of the database after they have issued a query, and the data model is based on Codd's relational model. Hadoop-based systems such as HBase are on the front-left corner with coordinates (big, pull, fk/pk). The data model is still rectangular with rows, columns, and primary keys, and results a...