Turing Award-Winner Stonebraker On The Future Of Taming Big Data - Forbes

Excerpt from an extensive Michael Stonebraker interview/profile

"Is there a future beyond the future defined by the three startups Stonebraker is currently involved with? “Right now I’m not interested in starting any more companies,” Stonebraker says flatly. But then he adds: “If I had more bandwidth, it would be what I’m working on at MIT right now, what we call Polystores.”

Again, this is an age-old problem, tackled before with the not-too-successful concept of “federated” databases. Today, it’s an extension and expansion (in my opinion) of the Big Variety problem, what happens after the data has been “curated” (cleaned and integrated). Following his strong convictions about the advantages of special-purpose databases and given the proliferation of not just sources of data but also data types, Stonebraker suggests that “it makes sense to load the curated data into multiple DBMSs. For example, the structured data into an RDBMS, the real-time data into a stream processing engine, the historical archive into an array engine, the text into Lucene, and the semi-structured data into a JSON system.”"

Turing Award-Winner Stonebraker On The Future Of Taming Big Data - Forbes