GPUs are coming to your database!
Database technology for transaction processing and that for analytics have, kinda, moved in different directions. This has largely been from a “separation of concerns” perspective . Transactions are all about velocity, with people speeding up databases by making them in-memory (e.g. HANA), and/or adding columnar capabilities (e.g. Postgres, Oracle, and, well, everybody). Analytics, OTOH, are usually about volume — having massively parallel or distributed back-ends that can run through gobs of data very fast (e.g. Vertica, Redshift, Netezza, etc.) is pretty much table-stakes in this world. Mind you, when one talks about massively parallel , GPUs should come to mind, and it clearly did for Kinetica , SQream , and MapD who are all using GPUs to run the parallelized parts of SQL queries in their analytics databases. The result, as you might imagine, is a huge speed up in query processing for analytics. MapD, in partic...