Alexander Williams

"With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers."

In an earlier post, I created a concurrent Erlang version of the "99 Bottles of Beer" beer song. In that post, I mentioned that I was reading a beta copy of Joe Armstrong's new book Programming Erlang - Software for more...

A blogger responds to an article that argues that MapReduce is a step backwards compared to relational databases.

Hadoop is a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Here's what makes Hadoop especially useful: * Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes. * Economical: It distributes the data more...

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges more...