This is classic Stonebraker. It's a favorite strategy of his to say something so offensive to the audience that they will be itching for a rebuttal. Then on c

This is classic Stonebraker. It's a favorite strategy of his to say something so offensive to the audience that they will be itching for a rebuttal. Then on closer inspection you discover that it's much ado about nothing. Here is one example: he says Teradata used MapReduce techniques 20 years ago and he's right (Teradata's ability to handle arbitrarily large data sets with hash partitioning helped WalMart get to where it is today). A Teradata system makes additional assumptions regarding data placement that MapReduce doesn't. In a Teradata system the data is actually stored at the processing nodes. If you take the idea of MapReduce and "extend" it with an optimizer that knows where the data is and how it is organized, you get pretty close to the Teradata architecture. Viola: an RDBMS based on MapReduce. Now look closely at what he's saying: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards. Well, he may be right on there. MapReduce is not likely to help you win any database research grants - it was old news to that community 20 years go.