Weighing Open Source’s Worth for the Future of Big Data
“If you’re trying to overcome a technology like relational databases, which have been developed over decades and had gestation from every major university in the world that does computer science research, it takes a long time to climb that hill,” Kreps says. “What’s very different for us is there hasn’t really been this incredibly well-developed infrastructure layer in the space we’re entering. We get to kind of make it up as we go along, which is a huge advantage. “
This perhaps is the reason why — despite the availability of MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL RDBMs, the advent of modern NoSQL and NewSQL solutions, and scalable Hadoop and object-storage alternatives — proprietary RDBMs continue to drive the lion’s share of enterprise spending in the data management space.
Phi Beta Iota: The time has come for a clean-sheet fresh start. The Internet was designed for machine to machine communication, it was never designed for humans or content. We process less than 1% of the Big Data we have in hand and that in turn is less than 1% of what is known. A post-Amazon post-Google Internet will be distributed and encrypted, including the 50% of humanity not on the Internet today, and enable paragraph level linking and weighting.
