A Trillion Dollar Math Trick by Dick Lipton.
Dick reviews a presentation by Mike Stonebraker at TTI Vanguard meeting on “Ginormous Systems” in DC.
In part:
In Mike’s wonderful talk he made seven points about the past, present, and the future of database technology. He has a great track record, so likely he is mostly right on his guesses. One of his predictions was about a way of re-organizing databases that has several remarkable properties:
- It speeds up database operations 50x. That is to say, on typical queries—ones that companies actually do—it is fifty times faster than classical database implementations. As a theorist we like speedups, especially asymptotic ones. But 50x is pretty cool. That is enough to change a query from an hour to a minute.
- It is not a new idea. But the time is finally right, and Mike predicts that future databases will use this method.
- It is an idea that no one seems to know who invented it. I asked Mike, I asked other experts at the conference, and all shrugged and said effectively: “I have no idea.” Curious.
Let’s look quickly at the way databases work, and then consider the trick.
I won’t spoil the surprise for you, see Dick’s post for the details.
BTW, read the comments on historical uses of the same idea.
Then think about how to apply to topic maps.
I first saw this in Christophe Lalanne’s A bag of tweets / May 2013.