Having been an early adopter (2007) and riding the whole wave I think the entire movement ignited with MapReduce, BigTable, etc. was probably one of the best things that happenned in the industry.
For me personally, it allowed to break things down to first principles in a way that "industry coding" wouldn't have been able to. It was the practical side of theory that was confined in school.
There were, however, two types of big data adopters. I was in the bottom up camp, where passion for learing and finding the best solution to the problem was the driver. The top-down camp that eventually filled the Hadoop conferences by the time they got large (>1000 people) I suspect didn't get much out of it, neither for their organizations, nor personally.
So back to Stonebreaker, back then, same as now, looks like a frustration more than anything. I do understand where it comes from, but still a frustration more than anything.
Relational algebra is nice, but classical databases and SQL never nailed neither theory nor practice. NoSQL for me was more NoOracle, No<MSSQL, etc. and an ability to learn by doing from the ground up.
For me personally, it allowed to break things down to first principles in a way that "industry coding" wouldn't have been able to. It was the practical side of theory that was confined in school.
There were, however, two types of big data adopters. I was in the bottom up camp, where passion for learing and finding the best solution to the problem was the driver. The top-down camp that eventually filled the Hadoop conferences by the time they got large (>1000 people) I suspect didn't get much out of it, neither for their organizations, nor personally.
So back to Stonebreaker, back then, same as now, looks like a frustration more than anything. I do understand where it comes from, but still a frustration more than anything. Relational algebra is nice, but classical databases and SQL never nailed neither theory nor practice. NoSQL for me was more NoOracle, No<MSSQL, etc. and an ability to learn by doing from the ground up.