The Reinvented Blog

What if your real life is pretty difficult, and there is not much you can do about it? Well, virtual life can sometimes provide more realness than real life, especially if you have the spirit of Alice Krueger. She can’t get around easily in real life, but she has created a community to help others on Second Life.
Her story was recently featured at the Health 2.0 conference on Web 2.0 technologies in San Diego.

I’ve used databases for a long time, but I’ve taken them for granted as things that worked well for what I wanted to do and didn’t require much further thought. I feel kind of stupid that it had never occurred to me to think about how dependent they were on the concept of rows – that is, it is the row that dominates the database, not the column.

But once I started to read about Michael Stonebreaker’s company, Vertica, it become so obvious – of course, if you make the column central to the database instead of the row, you open up all sorts of possibilities because the data in each column is uniform. Imagine a simple database of names and addresses – each row contains the name and address for an individual, but each column contains only one sort of data, like the zip code. Making a database column-centric rather than row-centric means that you have uniform data to store and access. Vertica claims that it is faster by 80-fold to access the data in a column-centric database, as well as offering major advantages in compression for storage.

Once you are told this concept, it seems so obvious in its potential advantages that it is a total no-brainer. Yet I probably would not have thought of it on my own. I wonder how many other paradigm shifts are out there waiting for someone to make the rest of us see how obvious they are. Vertica has raised 20+ million for its database idea. As they say, current relational databases have stayed the same for 30 years. What else could benefit from a 180 degree turn?