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Message-ID: <e7e0a2570709071838y6619f736yaaa5c94be294b5f0@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 19:38:40 -0600
From: "Josh Tolley" <eggyknap@gmail.com>
To: "Avery Payne" <apayne@pcfruit.com>
Subject: Re: A Silly Idea for Vertically-Oriented Databases
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <46E1D302.9030803@pcfruit.com>
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References: <46E1D302.9030803@pcfruit.com>

On 9/7/07, Avery Payne <apayne@pcfruit.com> wrote:
>
>  Avery,
>
> <my ramblings snipped>
>
> >If someone writes the rest of the code, I doubt the syntax will be the
> >holdup. But writing an efficient C-store table mechanism is much harder
> >than I think you think it is; Vertica worked on it for a year and failed,
> >and Paraccel took two years to succeed. FYI, Paraccel is based on
> >Postgres.
>
> >So, put up a pgfoundry project and start hacking a c-store table; I'm sure
> >you;ll get interest if you can make something work.
>
> >--
> >--Josh
>
> Well, I did say it was a *crazy* idea. :-)
>
> Given that I would be starting from the ground-floor, learning not only
> the innards of PostgreSQL but also C coding as well, I would probably
> have to overcome near-insurmountable odds to make this project take off.
> Still,
> if I was crazy enough to think it, maybe I'll be crazy enough to
> try for it. ;-)
>
> Just ignore my 2nd posting, I was trying to clarify some of the
> ramblings I was typing.

For whatever it's worth, I was reading about the same things today and
came up with the same basic idea, without the same level of
implementation details you've talked about, Avery. And it sounds
really neat. Hard, but neat, and potentially worth it if, say,
Paraccel doesn't open source their stuff first :)

But I don't know the PostgreSQL internals either, though I've been
known to throw together some C code now and again. So in short,
there's interest. Whether there's collective skill/free
time/motivation/insanity/etc. enough to make something useful of the
interest is another question altogether. :)

- Josh/eggyknap