Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Strange Postfellows: Haskell and Open Source Olap? Andrew Piskorski writes: Hi John, I happened to see your recent blog post on Open Source OLAP tools, which reminded me that you'd probably also find the email below interesting. --- Have you heard of MonetDB? I just stumbled across it recently, lots of interesting and potentially useful stuff. In addition, it seems to have a nice (and unusual) mix of academic research and industry robustness. Its main developers seem to have spun off a startup for several years, sold MonetDB to various big financial companies for OLAP data crunching, then sold their startup, and are now back in academia. MonetDB is open source, but unfortunately the latest coolest research version "X100" isn't. Apparently they haven't decided yet when or whether to open source it. http://monetdb.cwi.nl/ http://homepages.cwi.nl/~mk/MonetDB/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/monetdb/ ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/debull/A05june/issue1.htm There's one guy, Joel Reymont, who's apparently building a "real-time, very short-frequency trading platform", and is considering trying to use MonetDB in a Kdb-like role: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7836815&forum_id=42505 http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7840264&forum_id=39803 http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7840265&forum_id=39803 http://wagerlabs.com/ http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmo-scalable-server/ From his blog Reymont seems likely to (at least more or less) know what he's talking about. Among other things, he also has an interesting review of Haskell vs. Erlang, based on his own recent real world projects using them. Quick synopsis is that he REALLY likes Haskell, but Erlang wins hands-down for real work. Also: "I fought the fight but did not win. I drank the poison Kool-aid. I still have an itch to try to fit Haskell into trading or some other domain like AI or robotics but it seems to me that some things in Haskell are unnecessarily complex, to the detriment of my productivity." I had heard of MonetDB, but I had thought it's emphasis as more academic, and friends haven't had the greatest experience compiling it. Thanks for the linkfest, Andrew. It will be interesting to see what Joel comes up with. 2:23:19 PM      comment []  trackback []

More bandwidth stuff Some of my more clued in readers pointed me to some hosting options for the big file download. Talli recommended openonomy and streamload, but I think both have too-small bandwidth thresholds. Mike Adler recommended using a torrent, which is something I did in 2001 when it was slightly painful and very pointless - my download rate of ~ .8 VM's/day didn't quite hit the bitTorrent sweet spot :-). The pain part, setting up a tracker on a hosted account, has now been taken care of via public trackers, and Mike offered to let me use his tracker (which is also tracking Air America podcasts - cool!) if I wanted. I'll probably take him up on it, but for now the marginal bandwith costs and adsense revenue are kind of cancelling each other out. I did put up a dijjerized OasisVM link in an attempt to keep my under my ISP account's 100G/mo threshold, since that was the only way to akamize my download for free using vi and spending less than 1 minute. Yes, I'm lazy. 2:17:50 PM      comment []  trackback []