Hi, I've had some limited experience with Oracle, SQL Server, Informix and at least one commercial in-memory database.
More recently, I use mysql memory tables for fun speeding up bulk read-write operations such as: set max_heap_table_size=250*1024*1024; create table mem_proptbl (field_one varchar(32),value_one varchar(100), index using hash(value_one)) engine=memory; downside is i/o time and churning when later writing to disk. Column-oriented approaches like SPARQL remind me of XQuery, good for specific uses but with limited adoption. HBase looks to be a component for distributed, RAM and log based byte-arrays that should be able to be COMPRESSED by simply bzip2ing the logs... It's a much needed scalability tool complementary to RDBMS and it's columns don't affect how I store the data offline. Thanks to it's contributors for Rocking the House. Later, Peter W. Jonathan Hendler wrote:
One of the valid points ... has to do with compression (and null values). For example - does HBase also offer tools, or a strategy for compression?
