> yet you propose dumbing down the database even farther, without any hope
of ACID
> compliance, without any transactional integrity, indeed, without even
really being
> relational ?
> at least, thats what I get from my first read of it.
OK so you are a theorist/perfectionist, I can respect that. Perhaps what I
meant to say instead of "dumbing down the database" was "dumbing down the
use of SQL to the point where it is not much better that indexed-style reads
and writes".
Is my idea perfect? No, far from it, and if there are better ideas out there
then great, I hope they get pushed forward.
But I do believe my idea is far better than the alternative of sticking our
heads in the sand and hoping that cloud computing goes away and in the mean
time web developers are stuck using databases that only support very "dumbed
down" SQL sub-sets/derivatives like Google's GQL or Amazon's SimpleDB query
syntax.
At a detailed level (which is NOT the direction I want this thread to go) I
do not agree with your statement that my proposal has no "hope of ACID
compliance or transactional integrity". When the "slices" are stored back
to the cloud, this is the equivalent of a commit and the integrity thereof
is as good as what ever the underlying technology is. Is the concurrency as
good as native Postgres? Of course not. Is the commit/rollback flexibility
as good as native Postgres? Again no. But what's the alternative? Watch
cloud computing take off leaving Postgres with the reputation of "great
database software in yesterday's era of monolithic servers"?