Stonebraker was unable to partition the nine-table TPC-C schema in such a way that each TPC-C transaction can be performed on a single node. The “Voter” teaching example used by VoltDB has only one table and two queries. :-) See http://www.slideshare.net/VoltDB/building-voltdb-applications

A slightly more balanced way to look at this:
Cassandra is new software backed by relatively new algorithms.
Of course its not perfect.
Of course its not a silver bullet.

Since it requires a new way for data modeling, a lot of implementations will suck until we figure out how to do it right.

It is a real attempt to solve a real problem web sites ran into. It is interesting and worth following. If you have a problem that matches this solution – you can consider trying Cassandra, knowing that it has bugs and will not solve all your problems easily.

First, people use it because it is free. Second, it is not perfect because Reddit is down much more and seems slow at times and every other time I go to twitter I get the “Ooops something is wrong.”

Something is wrong, they all use Cassandra. I can’t fault the technology, but maybe the people implementing it? Ok, maybe it is the technology too. Either way, it is not as “simple” as they make it out to be and it is not a silver bullet.

It is irresponsible to describe some of the mechanisms he proposed to eliminate without having sufficient detail about their replacements. I will gladly give up undo and redo for a fully working and provable redundant recovery mechanism that’s been thoroughly tested, but not one that doesn’t even quite yet exist!

Come to think of it, IT software salesman are notorious for doing exactly the same thing.

I’m very interested in real-world stories of how these ideas worked for VoltDB customers. Especially if VoltDB really doesn’t allow for ad-hoc queries.

Your vitriol against Stonebraker aside, the issue of DBA cost versus developer cost is an interesting one. I’ve talked to organizations that put a lot of effort into minimizing DBA cost per database instance and other groups that lament development costs. Minimizing both is the logical desire (unless you’re a DBA or an application developer).

Remember that for MIT professors, developers are called “grad students” and are very cheap indeed :)

Why listen? Because amidst the bullshit, there are ideas that can work.

CTO of Amazon read the paper, decided that much of it can’t work, but in-memory distributed OLTP can work.
Amazon built their own version which is way more practical, but also involves “eventual consistency”.

3 Years later and everyone talks about those NoSQL databases.

Maybe its just a fad, but you can’t ignore the fact that either Stonebraker predicted the future, or he invented it. Either way, its worth listening.