Blogs

MonetDB Data Vaults (DV) are database-attached external files or file repositories [1]. Based on a concept similar to SQL/MED, they can be used for managing external data. One of the primary purposes of a data vault is to allow faster and easier processing of data stored in large file repositories.

The MonetDB team at CWI/MonetDB BV is pleased to announce the Oct2014-SP3 release of the MonetDB suite of programs.

Here are highlights of some of the changes in this release:

Holger Pirk was awarded a PhD today (2015-05-01) for his on work on investigating the management of relational data in modern hardware and how data processing performance can be improved. He developed a new processing model using the basic MonetDB BATs, which in this case are not treaded as memory mapped files, but each value is decomposed into relevant (leading) bits and residual bits. The fast memory (usually attached to a GPU) holds the relevant bits, while the residual bits are stored in the slower CPU memory.

Triggered by the abundant interests in our MonetDB/R integration solution worldwide, we have been working on ways to make it easier to try out. One solution is based on the emerging standard for (lightweight) virtualization, called Docker containers. MonetDB/R is now available as a Docker container from the MonetDB team. If you are familiar with Docker, try out our "database-in-a-box".

To start, pull the MonetDB container image from the Docker Hub Registry:

docker pull monetdb/monetdb-r-docker

Next, simply run it:

To deal with the deluge of data produced by modern sequencers, life science researchers are turning to analytical databases. To help with this (really) big data problem, the MonetDB team has been working together with the CWI Life Sciences group [2]. The result collaboration is the MonetDB/BAM module - a bioinformatics extension, designed to easily load and quickly process genomic data. The authors have also tested the new module, publishing a case study on Ebola virus diversity [1].