To be fair, Spark is way too slow to be used as a back-end database system (there's a big bap between "lightning speed computation", as they put them, and a common workload for a database serving data to a user-facing application).
Now of course Spark makes up for it with its great flexibility and scalability, but I do not really see the two technologies as competing ones.
This even without getting into the other parts of the data model (insert, update, delete) that do not exist in Spark (or "kind of" exist), by design.
I have tried it ~1 month ago and was quite a bit underwhelmed - direct connectivity with Google products is nice, but the data manipulation capabilities themselves lag behind Tableau a big deal (especially when it comes to clicking around in charts and tables to slice your dataset, which is admittedly something in which Tableau excels).
I do believe it is a valuable addition to the GA enterprise tier (especially for customers savvy enough to use BigQuery too), but at the moment I don't quite see it as a serious competitor to other off-the-shelf BI tools - would be very happy to be proved wrong in a few months, though.
Perhaps that's closer to ClearScript (https://clearscript.codeplex.com/) in the .NET environment - although ClearScript has a broader area of application and supports multiple engines.
It would be interesting to see how much the performances improve once you use cstore_fdw (especially since 1M records is quite small when talking about OLAP workloads).
disclaimer: I've never used cstore_fdw, but I have evaluated a number of columnar databases in the past.
I've recently switched from a Windows Phone back to an Android one, and from my experience WP keyboard suggestions are usually more on point compared to the Android ones. Only thing I miss about the old phone, really :-) I will be trying SwiftKey now.
Nothing, really (if it works for you!). It's just extremely far removed from the usual way pizza is consumed in Italy. I'm usually annoyed by the many culinary debates we like to have (e.g. when should you put cheese on your pasta), but this one I can relate to :-)
I think I might have met a few, as I am Italian myself :-)
To be honest the story would be much more believable if the writer weren't a foreigner - that kind of reaction from the shop owner is usually reserved for much stronger violations of the "pizza code" (pineapple pizza being the go-to example!)
And they were not the only ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable