It's worth noting, in addition to looking down upon MapReduce, Stonebraker and the academic crowd were equally unimpressed by other commodity hardware scale-out practices of the time – including the practical-minded RDBMS sharding and caching strategies used by all the booming massive-scale startups.
In 2011, in an interview with GigaOm, Stonebraker famously called Facebook's use of sharded MySQL and Memcached "a fate worse than death" [1]. He also claimed the company should redesign their entire infrastructure, seemingly without clarifying what specific problem he thought needed to be solved.
The reader comments on that post are also quite interesting in tone.
Edit to add a disclosure: I joined Facebook's MySQL team a couple years after this, and quite enjoyed their database architecture, which certainly colors my opinion of this topic.
It's worth noting, in addition to looking down upon MapReduce, Stonebraker and the academic crowd were equally unimpressed by other commodity hardware scale-out practices of the time – including the practical-minded RDBMS sharding and caching strategies used by all the booming massive-scale startups.
In 2011, in an interview with GigaOm, Stonebraker famously called Facebook's use of sharded MySQL and Memcached "a fate worse than death" [1]. He also claimed the company should redesign their entire infrastructure, seemingly without clarifying what specific problem he thought needed to be solved.
The reader comments on that post are also quite interesting in tone.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110710005619/http://gigaom.com...
Edit to add a disclosure: I joined Facebook's MySQL team a couple years after this, and quite enjoyed their database architecture, which certainly colors my opinion of this topic.