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Showing posts from April, 2012

PiQL tech talk

Big Data has been gaining a lot of press lately, and NoSQL even more. A lot of new software development is moving to using NoSQL databases to alleviate the scaling pains of traditional RDBMS systems when the data size grows very large. The NoSQL databases usually expose a simple key value based API, where you can set, retrieve, and scan values based on the value of the keys you're interested in. The API is sufficient for most applications, but sometimes you want more than the simple retrieval API; you want SQL, where you can join keys, and have more complex filtering rules. Here is where PiQL plays a role. Last week I attended a talk about PiQL by Michael Armbrust. In the talk, Michael introduced PiQL: a query system that runs on top of NoSQL key-value stores, and allows developers to write SQL queries that execute efficiently against the simple key-value retrieval API. The system operates in two stages: the first is the static analysis stage, and the second is the execution s