One of the most interesting talks at a recent anniversary celebration for computer science at MIT was by Michael Stonebraker, a fake MITer (he is best known for Ingres and Postgres, UC Berkeley implementations of IBM’s relational database management system concept). For the past few years, Stonebraker has been working on a database-first vision of computing:
For those who don’t want to watch the 55-minute video, the idea is to run a high-performance RDBMS underneath the operating system (OS) and have the OS use DBMS services to hold its state, support inter-process communication, to roll back to a known good state after a failure or an attack, etc.
Here’s a figure from a 2022 progress report:
The events opened with computer science PhDs acknowledging that humanity faces an existential threat from climate change (Science says that if you can program a computer you can predict the Earth’s temperature 50 years from now). If we combine that with the observation that humans are actually increasing, not decreasing, their CO2 emissions, humanity will soon be extinct. Do we actually need to rethink our practical foundation for computing if these are our sunset years? If yes, this strikes me as the most promising idea.
What about performance? Stonebraker says that the “OS-on-database” runs applications about as fast as conventional “OS-including-ad-hoc-data-management-schemes-for-all-of-its-state”.
It doesn’t count unless chatgpt is used somewhere. Thought saving operating system state was already solved when hibernation mode was written. Never underestimate the ability of theoretical computer scientists to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic to no end.
Professor at MIT for 21 years => Fake MIT’er
Sounds like a serious case of nail-shapedness of everything to somebody holding a hammer.
Alan: What’s “fake” is not how Stonebraker presents himself, but how MIT takes credit for his accomplishments, the most notable of which happened in that perfected city by the Bay.
Point taken.
As someone whose “student code” was still in Sybase the last time I looked and was also a Vertica and VoltDB customer at some point, I feel his accomplishments were pretty balanced between the coasts.
Microsoft famously tried to do this and found there was not enough of a value add to justify the migration.
ZFS from Sun had rollback more than 15 years ago, so I am curious what else a db filesystem would add.
Of course ZFS is now owned by Oracle so perhaps they should be building mainstream consumer laptops with the best of the filesystem and rdbms world. You just need to make a little time to talk to your friendly Oracle licensing rep before every OS update. Be sure to have your income and net worth statements handy.
What’s old, is new again. Have we forgotten the old claim that Java was going to replace the OS? That all you need is a browser? And what about the cloud replacing your laptop with a dumb terminal?
Btw, has anyone noticed, at 1:45, when the team is introduced, that the team is made of all white people and only 1 white woman of Asian descent? There is no single true Black or non-binary person on the team! Where is the outrage?