Regarding the edit, I don't see what's ridiculous about the statement. Can you elaborate? When he says arbitrary functions, I think he's basically comparing i

Regarding the edit, I don't see what's ridiculous about the statement. Can you elaborate? When he says arbitrary functions, I think he's basically comparing it to the limitations of SQL solutions that are traditionally used for data warehousing. SQL is abused beyond belief and also slow beyond belief for certain types of queries. MapReduce provides a pretty good place to start from. Sure, it's awkward for certain things. But if you're going to rearchitect a distributed system from scratch for each computation you do, you're not going to make progress very quickly. See this paper for the opposite viewpoint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520057 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4520057 He provides solutions to common problems which can be expressed with MapReduce. The lambda architecture is more powerful than what's being advocated in that article (plain mapreduce), although I'm not sure if it's really a thing people are using or just a subject of a book.