MonetDB for Everybody

September 26th, 2005 matthias

Is it just me, or should everybody be using MonetDB, instead of whatever database they are currently wrestling with? The feature list is impressive: fast, runs on everything, SQL and XQuery support, open-source. There are some limitations, but overall this looks like a very impressive product.

Entry Filed under: Technology

1 Comment Add your own

  • 1. matthias  |  April 12th, 2006 at 8:48 am

    I finally got the chance to take a closer look at MonetDB - building it, installing it, and running through some performance tests.

    On one of our projects we have been plagued by MySQL’s and other databases inability to efficiently execute a variety of count(*) queries on a table with 4 million rows. For example, MySQL will take 40 seconds to run select count(*) from table.

    In MonetDB the same queries return results instantly. And that’s without configuring any keys or indices! I am not sure it is actually avoiding the counting in those queries - it may just be able to count very very fast.

    However, MonetDB’s SQL implementation has some gaps, though it aims to conform to SQL’99 and ‘03, unlike MySQL’s SQL’92. I also found the documentation to be in quite bad shape - there’s a fair amount of it but it is really badly organized and presented. So, for the time being at least, MonetDB is still to immature to use in production systems.

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