Stonebreaker Comments on Caffiene and Linking SciDB to R

Dr. Micheal Stonebraker of MIT had a short presentation on SciDB on Friday. SciDB is an interesting project because of its stated goal of addressing the needs of the research community. Dr. Stonebraker is one of the thought leaders when its comes to databases whether you agree with him or not. In 2008 he wrote a paper saying that Hadoop and Map Reduce were a steps backwards in terms of technology development. In 2010 Google dropped Map Reduce in favor of Caffeine. I really hope Caffeine uses Java Beans!

The meeting on Friday was to announce the release of SciDB V1.0 which is supposed to be a much more feature rich than the current V0.75. It is also interesting to note that the only analytics environment they plan to integrate with is R because that is the only one SciDB users use. While I am not sure doing a open source project that is for research only is the best idea because it may cut down on some useful contributions from the non-academic world, I do think SciDB is an interesting project.