Re: Google's Summer of Code ...

On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 15:50 -0500, Meredith L. Patterson wrote:
> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > Do we have any 'students' that are already up to speed, enough so that
> > they'd be able to accomplish something significant over a 2-3 month period?
>
> Well, I suppose now might be a good time to de-lurk. Hi, my name's
> Meredith, I'm a PhD student at the University of Iowa, I've been reading
> pgsql-hackers for a few months now, and I'm planning on submitting a
> Postgres-related project to the Summer of Code program.
>
> My research area is data mining

Sounds interesting...

> I've been reluctant to mention this in the past, mainly because I don't
> see it as enormously useful to Postgres users as a whole; your average
> user doesn't know what a support vector machine is, and while I have a
> laundry list of use cases for this kind of search capability, the
> Postgres end of it is more useful as support for the system as a whole
> rather than a standalone Postgres feature.

Is it possible that you could put sufficient of the application into
PostgreSQL to genericise some features? Stonebraker's Third Wave was
*all* about putting data intensive operations closer to where the data
is stored/accessed. That definitely applies to data mining, so you are
in the right project.

What would you do AFTER you've built in ALL of the above? Why not think
of ways to lay the ground work for all of the things you'd like to do in
the future.

What can you do for other data mining hackers? How can you lay the
groundwork for others to assist your developments?

> Phew. Thanks for reading. I know there are a lot of TODO items that are
> high on the priority list, and I see that others here already know
> students who are working on projects more closely related to those
> things, so I understand entirely if y'all would prefer to work with
> someone who's adding more directly useful functionality to Postgres. I'm
> very glad to see the PGDG getting involved with the Summer of Code
> project, and either way, I look forward to having enough free time to
> start tackling various TODO items myself. :)

The project needs free-thinkers, so don't feel that you have to stick to
the TODO. Just make sure you have a very clear benefit case.

Best Regards, Simon Riggs