YOOT

I’ve recently discovered and tested MonetDB, an “open-source database system for high-performance applications in data mining, OLAP, GIS, XML Query, text and multimedia retrieval”.

I did some benchmarking (1.5Gb database) and it literally blew away other desktop databases such as:

• Sql Compact Edition 3.5 (the slowest)
• Firebird 2.1.2 (tried to tune it, but still slow)
• SqlServer 2008 Express (doesn’t parallelize requests)

Here is something something very unusual that you can read in the documentation concerning indexes:

The index statements in the SQL standard are recognized, but their implementation is different from competitive products. MonetDB/SQL interprets these statements as an advice and often freely neglects it, relying on its own decision to create and maintain indexes for fast access.

You’ve read it correctly … there is no really need to create indexes as MonetDB has some internal algorithms that are optimized for OLAP-type of queries, that is to say, queries that usually process a huge number of rows, performing calculations on columns using aggregate operations.

To give you an idea, I had results around 500 ms for queries processing millions of records while other databases were struggling.

It doesn’t have a native .Net driver currently but there is an ODBC one so that’s fine.

Note: The test was considering ‘desktop databases’ only … not ‘server databases’. SqlServer 2008 Developer edition was tested and performed pretty well.

Definitely a project to keep an eye on …