Database Article questions
Write up answers to four of the following sets of numbered questions.
Share your answers in a GoogleDoc with profchadd@gmail.com by 11:45am, Nov 23.
Be prepared in class on Nov 23 to discuss the questions below.
1 What leads to "data inflation" in a Relation DBMS?
2 What, do you think, is the typical use case of MySQL in the
LAMP stack? What does the workload look like? How does this
compare to the workload discussed in the Jacobs article?
3 Jacobs talks a good deal about temporal ordering. What does this
mean and why is it important. Could you force a MySQL table to
be stored in temporal order?
4 Jacobs says:
"The prevailing database model today, however, is the relational database,
and this model explicitly ignores the ordering of rows in tables."
Why is this? What benefit do we get from this?
5 Why is sequential disk access 5 orders of magnitude faster than
random disk access but sequential RAM access only 1 order of magnitude
faster than random RAM access? Why is this important if, as Jacobs says
on page 38, "In fact, our table of \"all the people in the world\" will
fit in the memory of a single, $15K Dell server with 128GB RAM."?
6 Is Jacobs looking for a hardware or software solution to the problem
of big data?
7 What does Jacobs have to say about normalization with respect to big
data?
8 What is Jacobs point about the Zero-one-infinity rule? Is he saying
programmers are lazy or stupid or both or something else? Why do most
versions of Microsoft Excel limit you to 65,536 rows?
9 Who, which customers, face the problems Jacobs is talking about? Who
will face these problems in 10 or 20 years?
10 As a wealty alumna or alumnus of Pacific Univeristy, what research
area are you going to donate money to in order to help solve Jacobs's
problem?
11 Does Stonebraker offer any solutions to Jacobs?