[OSGeo-Discuss] Tales from a Benevolent Dictator

Sun May 15 09:20:54 PDT 2016

Hi Rob,

excellent, now we are getting into technical discussion.

I did not say that rasdaman is the best in the universe under all possible
constellations, but we do have both theoretical considerations and practical
results that suggest that rasdaman performs outstandingly well on n-D arrays.

Your offer to participate is very welcome, and timely. We have established the
RDA Array Database Assessment WG, and here we need as many volunteers as
possible to undertake this huge endeavour of getting reproducible knowledge
about the state of the art, best practices, etc. Here is the page:
https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/array-database-working-group.html

Participation is at no cost and open, same the results. Just register yourself
with RDA and let me know so that we canplan contributions.

Looking forward to welcoming you on board,
Peter

On 05/15/2016 06:10 PM, Rob Emanuele wrote:
> Apologies for veering off topic.
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> Thanks for citing your resources. Unfortunately I can't access the one paper,
> since the only version I could find is behind a paywall, and the bar chart you
> attached gives very little information; from these I cannot understand the
> methodology or results. If you have more details I would be happy to look
> further into this.
>
> My concern is with your wide sweeping statements, and the implication that
> rasdaman has been scientifically verified to be more performant than any other
> system in all cases. This to me feels hyperbolically similar to measuring that
> a bowling ball falls faster than a piece of paper when dropped from the roof
> of a building and concluding that trees are the objects which fall most slowly
> towards the earth.
>
> For instance, I have doubts that those who had conducted the quoted
> performance benchmarks set up the Apache Spark system in a way that represents
> all potential configurations. I work on the GeoTrellis project [1], which adds
> raster processing capabilities to Spark. I could for instance imagine a system
> where raster data was stored in Accumulo, indexed by GeoTrellis, and processed
> through Spark, which is very fast under many query types. I won't make any
> assumptions on how fast as compared to other systems, and it's very possible
> that rasdaman will beat out such a system in a set of query types, or perhaps
> all queries. However, it is my opinion that until the two systems were
> compared in such a way that everyone agreed on on the methodology and the
> results, casually using the "fact" that one system is "way faster" than the
> other system, and that one beats the other "in all benchmarks" as an argument
> for some treatment from OSGeo (or for any other purpose) deserves to be called
> into question, which I am doing here.
>
> I'd be happy to collaborate to develop, out in the open and in front of any
> paywalls, an objective system of measuring performance between systems. At
> which point in time we could make proclamations like, "[whichever framework],
> under [these specific query types], running on [however many nodes, whatever
> type of hardware], storing [this amount] of [this type of data], performs
> better than [some other framework] under the same conditions". Until then, I
> object to your very broad statements of superiority.
>
> Regards,
> Rob
>
> [1] https://github.com/geotrellis/geotrellis
>
> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 9:30 AM, Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be
> <mailto:mlennert at club.worldonline.be>> wrote:
>
>     On 15/05/16 14:40, Marco Afonso wrote:
>
>         Hi Anita,
>
>         Aha! So there is a ponderation weight on software quality evaluation AND
>         project organization evaluation.
>
>         So you can exclude an open source software with high quality if their
>         organization evaluation is low.
>
>         For me that seems wrong. A software on a public repository is only
>         limited by it's licence terms, or unlimited at all. :)
>
>
>     But the discussion is not about whether the software should be in a public
>     repository or not, or what the licence term should be. The discussion is
>     about what the meaning of the "OSGeo project" label is.
>
>     I don't think anyone has questioned the quality of the software, here.
>     However, one of the aims of labeling a project an OSGeo project is to give
>     a certain level of guarantee to potential users that this software
>     _project_ respects a series of criteria that are considered important to
>     ensure a long-term sustainability of that project. Putting one person's
>     name in the statutes of a project and designating that person as the one
>     who has ultimate decision rights (even if these decisions are always based
>     on quality criteria), leaves the question of what would happen if that
>     person lands under the proverbial bus.
>
>     A more collective governance structure is seen by many as more sustainable
>     in the long run. Similar debates have gone on for ages in Debian, for
>     example, about team-based maintaining of packages vs individual maintainers.
>
>     What I personally haven't really understood, yet, is what the rasdaman
>     community is really afraid of. If the community works as well as
>     described, why would the creation of a PSC-like structure create such
>     problems ?
>
>     Moritz
>
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>
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Peter Baumann
 - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
   www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
   mail: p.baumann at jacobs-university.de
   tel: +49-421-200-3178, fax: +49-421-200-493178
 - Executive Director, rasdaman GmbH Bremen (HRB 26793)
   www.rasdaman.com, mail: baumann at rasdaman.com
   tel: 0800-rasdaman, fax: 0800-rasdafax, mobile: +49-173-5837882
"Si forte in alienas manus oberraverit hec peregrina epistola incertis ventis dimissa, sed Deo commendata, precamur ut ei reddatur cui soli destinata, nec preripiat quisquam non sibi parata." (mail disclaimer, AD 1083)

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