Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 3 / The Great Database in the Sky, My SQL and Marten Mickos

Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco:

[My notes and analysis are in these square brackets.]

MySQL, Marten Mickos

    • Referred to a book on open source titled Innovation happens elsewhere
    • my data + your data + public data = next generation OLAP
    • We are running trillions of transactions per day on the internet
    • the biggest database is already out there – it’s just not connected.
    • MySQL wants to federate all of the existing data that is already out there and become the “skype for global data”
    • what if you could say:
      • select CurrentWindDirection, CurrentWindSpeed
      • SQL FROM AllTheWorldsWeatherStations, MyOwnWeatherStation, MyFriendsWeatherStation
      • WHERE…;
    • If we could do that, we could develop all sorts of new businesses on top of this.
    • Technlogy considerations:
      • As latency decreases, asynchronous approaches syncrhonous so data delay issues go away
      • we may need a “DNS” server for data sources
      • routing may be an issue
      • how do we make the data definitions understandable to others, and over a lifecycle of changes?
      • we can use simple technologies: RSS, HTML, XML, SMS, etc.
    • What would it take?
      • willingness among data owners to make their contents available
      • Brokerage keeping track of what has what data to offer and in what format
      • Technology for accessing the desired data (that doesn’t really exist in this fashion…but the components exist.)
      • You!
    • [So, he’s really talking about virtual data warehousing of the web’s data.]
    • “The data is the platform”
    • [This is the first I have heard of MySQL wanting to provide a massive metadata layer for the entire web. Interesting premise.If they use the principles of taking core data and then letting people modify it until the dataset is even more valuable, then that would imply letting hundreds of millions of people add to the metadata until it became the best metadata for the web that was out there.]