Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnpmayer | Hacker News Reader

This sounds a lot like AsterData Database, which I know has been around for at least a few years. I'm interested to know if you are able to write queries that define explicit parallelism like in the SQL-MapReduce language extension, and also the ability of the query preprocessor for the distributed workload.

View on HN

Hey, we currently don't have an SQL/MapReduce language extension, but we do have the Map & Reduce execution primitives implemented under the covers (for parallel query processing).

For the distributed query processor, we can efficiently parallelize SQL queries that involve look-ups, complex selections, groupings and orderings, analytic functions, and joins between one large and multiple small tables. We also have a lot more coming; are there any queries that you are particularly interested in?

any information about PostGis compatibility?

In all honesty, I'd have to check. The worker nodes in our architecture will be able to use PostGIS indexes just like regular PostgreSQL instances, and the master node should correctly handle (partition) most PostGIS functions. Still, we'd probably need to implement parallelization for the && operator, which shouldn't be that hard.

That said, I don't want to misguide you here before going over PostGIS' documentation more thoroughly. If you could ping us at engage@citusdata.com, we'll send you a reply once we know for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com