Thanks Edward, Our biggest concern is that there is no activity in the user@mrql list. Does this mean that there no one using MRQL or that nobody posts any messages? Is there a way to get the number of people registered in this list? Can we also get the number of times MRQL has been downloaded from Apache mirrors after its first release? It was hoped that after the first release people will start downloading MRQL and will register at user@mrql list to ask questions, report bugs, ask for new features, etc. It hasn't happened yet. Maybe it's too soon.
There are other query languages for big data analysis in ASF. All except MRQL are SQL-based data warehousing systems for Hadoop (eg, Hive and Tajo). MRQL is a query system for complex data analysis, including machine learning and scientific computing. This is the main difference from others. The fact that it can run on multiple platforms is a big plus, but is secondary. Currently, most people use Hadoop for big data analysis but soon this may change. I think people will start using fault-tolerant in-memory distributed systems for data analysis, such as Spark. Hama too may play a big role. So supporting multiple platforms will allow users to deploy applications using MRQL very fast and experiment with all these platforms without having to change the query. The whole idea of expressing distributed applications using an SQL-like query system is rapid and easy prototyping, without sacrificing performance. So performance is a very important factor. If MRQL is slow, nobody will use it. I think in this area, we are doing an excellent job because of the very advanced optimizer that allows operations such as matrix multiplication to be done using very fast algorithms. Leonidas Fegaras On 12/10/2013 08:33 PM, Edward J. Yoon wrote:
All, Since there are too many similar projects, I'd like to suggest that we change the future direction of MRQL to a powerful *analytics* query language on top of Hadoop beyond ETL processing. In my eyes, supporting multi-platforms (MapReduce, Hama, Spark, ...,etc) also seems pointless. WDYT?
