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I think the author is missing the many orders of magnitude of the recent growth in computing power and corresponding drop in flash costs. Compilers and interpre

I think the author is missing the many orders of magnitude of the recent growth in computing power and corresponding drop in flash costs. Compilers and interpreters are often wasteful too, but the benefits were so great that we eventually embraced them and never looked back. As far as persistence goes, who is to say that flash memory in modern systems isn't just as permanent in the real world as their disk-based counterparts? There are many ways to lose data, and a corrupted database is just as corrupted on a disk as it is in flash. I'd also add that it's bad form to ridicule the academics on whose shoulders your own career rests. Better to stick to the argument at hand rather than take things personally.

shadowmatter 15y ago
His "me" page explains that he's a database engineer at Facebook, and before that worked on performance-oriented systems and software at Wikipedia. It's part of his job to be aware of the drop in flash costs and employ it where he can while balancing performance with operating costs and expenses. No one is arguing that flash memory isn't as permanent as disks, but it's certainly not as cheap, especially on the scale of data that Facebook has. Every year or so Stonebreaker feels compelled to come down from his ivory tower to troll industry. Remember a few years ago when he co-authored the paper "MapReduce: A major step backwards" (http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/database-innovation/mapreduce-a-major-step-backwards/ http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/database-innovation/mapred...)? Nevermind that Google probably processes petabytes of data using MapReduce every day that ends up getting served on practically every Google property. How can he argue with results? Can't we just ignore him?
- vannevar 15y ago
  I don't doubt the author's credentials or expertise. My criticisms of his article stand; precisely because he's stuck in the day-to-day technical minutiae of running a system as large as Facebook's, I think he's missing the forest for the trees. And his jabs at academia just come off as being thin-skinned.

shadowmatter 15y ago

His "me" page explains that he's a database engineer at Facebook, and before that worked on performance-oriented systems and software at Wikipedia. It's part of his job to be aware of the drop in flash costs and employ it where he can while balancing performance with operating costs and expenses. No one is arguing that flash memory isn't as permanent as disks, but it's certainly not as cheap, especially on the scale of data that Facebook has. Every year or so Stonebreaker feels compelled to come down from his ivory tower to troll industry. Remember a few years ago when he co-authored the paper "MapReduce: A major step backwards" (http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/database-innovation/mapreduce-a-major-step-backwards/ http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/database-innovation/mapred...)? Nevermind that Google probably processes petabytes of data using MapReduce every day that ends up getting served on practically every Google property. How can he argue with results? Can't we just ignore him?

vannevar 15y ago
I don't doubt the author's credentials or expertise. My criticisms of his article stand; precisely because he's stuck in the day-to-day technical minutiae of running a system as large as Facebook's, I think he's missing the forest for the trees. And his jabs at academia just come off as being thin-skinned.