there was this programming language i remember reading about a while ago that was basically about moving computation around to different nodes to bring the "fun

there was this programming language i remember reading about a while ago that was basically about moving computation around to different nodes to bring the "function to the data" as opposed to the other way around -- which is the exact same thing that the white paper says clustrix is doing. anyways, with any sort of non-trivially related data, it becomes a continuous graph optimization problem to minimize the number of nodes you hit on any given "query" (ie: keep data that tends to be accessed together on the same nodes or die), and can easily see how though it may seem like an elegant solution, that you can very quickly run into scary problems that really are just a giant tangled mess. anyways, distributed joins aren't that hard. select and insert are solved by the key-value/consistent hashing dbs. even mysql cluster gives you all that stuff these days (the whitepaper mentions non-trivial multi-master joins) holla