Did Adam Bosworth reveal the real Google Base at the MySQL Users Conference?

Back in April of this year, Adam Bosworth laid out a compelling vision of how to create "internet scale" databases at the MySQL User Conference that sounds suspiciously like something Google Base might be designed to support (listen to the podcast).

Paraphrase: "Imagine being able to query all of the world's websites for their information -- not their content, but their information. You could find out what is for sale and at what price or where they are located accurately enough to place them on a map."

The examples he gave were all things that were in the (briefly exposed) Google Base interface: searching for real estate listings, finding local businesses, and findings products for sale.

To enable this vision Adam calls for the creation of a universal data-verse (my word, not his) that mirrors HTTP/HTML: standardized, simple, sloppy, stateless, and thus scaleable. This data-verse would have queries in the form of URLs and results bassed on RSS/Atom, similar to what Amazon is doing with OpenSearch at A9. It would be inherently distributed and any "P" programmer (Perl/Python/PHP) can easily participate because the RSS and Atom are so straightforward to implement (as evidenced by their large adoption).

Most interestingly, Adam suggested that Google would participate as a peer in this new global database -- encouraging the MySQL development community to create one of the first query engines that supports it. (Paraphrased) "In a few years we will look back and view the closed, centralized database servers of today as 'quaint'."

As the Oodle controversy with Craigslist points out, liberating information from content has real world implications that need to be worked out. That said, if this idea gets traction I am sure it will spur a new round of innovation that will make the current RSS-based innovation pale in comparison.

NB: I was listening to this podcast while driving so I am sure I got some of the details wrong.

Update 11/16/2005 While I still believe the Bosworth talk refers to the ideas behind Google Base, it appears I was wrong about Google intending to participate as a peer. At least currently there is no way to access the results of a Google Base query programmatically. No RSS output, nada.

Defined tags for this entry: a9, Adam Bosworth, atom, database, Google, Googlebase, opensearch, rss

Posted by Craig Ogg in Opinion at 11:58 | Comments (3) | Trackback (1)

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Democratizing Information: Speculation on the Future of Google Base
I have written previously on Adam Bosworth's talk at the MySQL Users Conference. At that time Google Base had not yet been revealed to the public. I now have had a chance to play with Google Base, have listened to the Bosworth's talk again and I have so

Weblog: Software Voices
Tracked: Dec 02, 10:05

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"Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them"

And those who ignore the lessons of relational databases are doomed to repeat them (poorly) once again using XML. Note that the classic (now largely abandoned) hierarchical databases are non-trivially isomorphic to XML.

There are good reasons why relational databases came to dominate over both hierarchical- and network-structured databases (which are also isomorphic to OOP structures).

Relational databases have a single consistent underlying model that allows organization and manipulation. No such model exists for object-oriented data, nor for XML, nor for hierarchical data. Further this can be proven to be true, but there is insufficient room provided to paste the proof in this text area.

Someday the object-oriented community may wake up and see the light but probably not. They prefer to instead paddle upstream in pursuit of a non-existent dream.

#1 Goat Roper on 2005-11-12 12:42 (Reply)

While I generally agree with your point of view with regard to OOP versus relational. In fact, I feel a slight nausea whenever I hear that someone is using a direct object-relational mapping layer thereby insuring they cannot get real value from their database system.

That said, Boswell's point is that neither OO nor relational scale to billions of records being processed in milliseconds. He is proposing databases where queries are always implemented in the form of a complete scan of the one and only table, just across thousands of machines simultaneously. In other words, exactly how Google search is implemented today. The salient difference is that attributes would be available for querying.

It is a seductive vision for how to scale querying, more so for the fact that it has already been proved successful. It does require a leap of faith on the updating side though. Everything would be essentially massively denormalized, and therefore inconsistent. He proposed solution to that is "relax, don't worry." The web scales because it turns out that most of the time "staleness" doesn't hurt that much.

Perhaps he has a point...

#1.1 Craig Ogg (Homepage) on 2005-11-13 20:37 (Reply)

Given that part of my current job description involves guessing what the big search engines are up to, it's interesting to see that many of them appear to be searching (no pun intended) for new paradigms for dealing with information at web scale.

On a somewhat tangential front, I've seen two interesting items related to Yahoo! in the past week.

First, they just hired the key developer who's spent the last 10 years working on the Protege Ontology Editor at Stanford. (His farewell message to the users' list said he's off to do "something completely different," but I would imagine the domain knowledge was deemed useful.)

Second, Rob McCool of Yahoo! has an article in the latest edition of IEEE Internet Computing entitled "Rethinking the Semantic Web, Part 1". McCool has done a fair amount of research work in this area himself, being one of the founders of the Alpiri project (TAP) at Stanford. His basic contention is that the semantic web, as currently envisioned, will fail. (Unfortunately, the article's a cliffhanger: his proposed solution to the problem doesn't appear until part 2.)

Interesting days ahead...

#2 Randy Bowen on 2005-11-17 11:18 (Reply)

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