The one constant that seems to come up in all these founder stories is that you better love what you're doing. There's no guarantee that your new business will be successful or profitable but it seems inevitable you will sink nearly all your time, energy, and money into it. You better be feel rewarded by the journey because that's all you can count on.
It's not as easy as it could be but you can accomplish aggregate pushdown by using executor hooks in your FDW. As an example I'd point you to our (Citus Data) recent work on doing this with our columnar store foreign data wrapper:
Thanks! Reminding myself of her feedback I think that pacing might be a significant issue which is something I hadn't considered too much (oddly).
She's someone that has lots of computer experience but the closest she's gotten to programming before is simple Excel functions (think SUM). I think she'll be much more excited by one where she's working on "real world" stuff so I'm leaving a bit towards Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps and hope that it spurs her to learn even more.
The business implications of this are interesting. In my opinion this is another warning shot that if you don't open source your business someone else may just do it for you. If I was LiveFyre or Disqus I'd definitely be nervous about Mozilla coming into my space and building competing software with a commitment from two of the big players to use it. Leveraging open source by adding value via services or premium offerings has been a very powerful business model in the last few years.
Interesting, I've have had the exact opposite experience for #2. If there's a movie, or TV show that I want to watch I'd rather pay $5 to watch it than just be told it's not available. This has had such a strong effect on me that if there's something in particular I want to watch I go to Amazon before Netflix simply because I know I will more likely have an option to watch what I want (even if it costs money). Personally I feel like Netflix has back themselves into a corner by only having one all-inclusive price level.
That said the part about Amazon that infuriates me is when they have the movies available but not for rent and only offer the pay $15 to own option. Also the Netflix discovery/browse is experience is light years better than Amazon's.
The benchmarks use cstore_fdw which is a columnar store that is accessed via the PostgreSQL foreign data wrapper system.
ICMS is a different implementation of a columnar store for PostgreSQL. I don't know it extremely well but my understanding is that it uses the PostgreSQL shared memory system to allocate memory for a columnar store. This columnar store is not queried via standard SQL commands but rather using a combination of a custom query language and some user defined functions.
If you use cstore_fdw with PostgreSQL you can use the full PostgreSQL SQL dialect for querying your table. However, we don't currently support writing to your cstore_fdw table using SQL commands like INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE. PostgreSQL added foreign data wrapper support for these commands with their 9.3 release and it is something we're considering adding to cstore_fdw in the future.
Actually CitusDB, which we also produce, does distribute data and queries across a PostgreSQL cluster. You can see some performance comparisons of using cstore_fdw on CitusDB in the blog post and the performance improvements are even more significant there.
At a high level columnar stores are good for analytical workloads and not great for OLTP workloads. Some reasons for this:
* cstore_fdw currently only supports modifying data via the COPY command. This means that UPDATE and DELETE operations aren't yet possible which limits the utility for OLTP workloads.
* The skiplist indexing system works well for analytical workloads where you are aggregating or retrieving a significant number of rows but wouldn't be great for retrieving single rows.
To clarify, you can already pay to watch past seasons of Game of Thrones on Amazon Video on Demand in the US. It's just not included for free with Prime which as I understand is the change that's happening for a subset of HBO content.
In the article there's a screenshot that strongly implies the ads will be coming via email ("this consent supersedes any prior email unsubscribe notification I may have with AT&T")
I feel like they have to stop at some point but I agree this would make much more sense than something like Oculus Rift. I can imagine lots of great ways to integrate this into Facebook.
Am I the only one that's not that impressed by 2 hours of downtime a year? I've worked at other companies where I was responsible for running a service and 2 hours of downtime a year was considered a failure.