MapReduce wars

A recent article on the Database Column as started a little war over MapReduce versus classic databases. I have no experience whatsoever with the MapReduce (other then the functional concept), but I find David DeWitt's post was a little excessive.

MapReduce is above all, simple, as are so many proven implementations. Naturally, there's no doubt about:

• MapReduce is a poor implementation (in comparison to B-trees)
• MapReduce is not novel
• MapReduce is missing features (such as loading and indexing)
• MapReduce is incompatible with the DBMS tools

But it seems to work for those who use it, it scales and is cheap. As Rich Skrenta commented:

...But if there's a 10X price win in there somewhere, the cheap rickety thing wins in the end. Think Linux vs. AT&T Unix, or mysql vs. Oracle...

It seems to me like too religious a war to take part in. Even stranger when we seem to know as fact that classic databases will keep there market share, as today MapReduce can only win on huge scenario usage.

Read the rest of this little war at InfoQ.