Cassandra == a "Grey Hole"?

Well I've survived my first week as Instaclustr Technology Evangelist (part-time) and my brain has 100 things on the TODO list to follow up. Really nice people with lots of cool code that spins ups and manages large amounts of data on Cassandra. 

I've been thinking about what a Technology Evangelist does. 

This blog was useful as it emphasises that it's all about "interest" :-)

I was struck by this comment as I tend not to be interested to regurgitation:

You should never give the same presentation twice because you will never have the same audience twice.

And his theory of evangelism:

Follow other experts. Start blogging and tweeting. Whenever you find something you think is interesting, note it down and share it with others. Disagree with people and explain why you think differently. Spend time pondering what’s going to happen next. Ask new questions, then do original research to find the answers and tell others what you have discovered. Be creative: build on others’ content, rather than recreating it. Improve your ideas by discussing them with everyone you meet.

More than happy to pick up on the idea of "interestingness".

Instaclustr provides managed Cassandra. NoSQL database for customers. What's "interesting" about Cassandra? 

Well, in some "interesting" way it's like a Black Hole. It's optimised for handling large volumes of writes (e.g. IoT, sensors, etc). The catch is that in order to to this it's harder (than relational DBs) to get the data out. So very much like a Black Hole. Except that obviously to be useful you need some way of getting the data out. And it turns out that Stephen Hawking has changed his mind (which I do all the time) about the even horizon and whether information can "leak" from a black hole. 

He now thinks (2014) (due to problems reconciling gravitational and quantum physics, and building on Hawking Radiation) that the event horizon isn't so black and white and Black Holes are more like Grey Holes. I.e. what goes it can come out (as information at least).

Ok, it looks like you may have to wait a while for the information to be finally "released" by grey holes, similar to reads being slower than writes for Cassandra perhaps?

This is where Hawking's recent paper comes in, suggesting that when you further stir the quantum mechanics into general relativity, the seething mass of the vacuum prevents the formation of a crisp, well-defined event horizon, replacing with a more ephemeral "apparent horizon".

This apparent horizon does the job of an event horizon, trapping matter and radiation within the black hole, but this trapping is only temporary, and eventually the matter and radiation are released carrying their stored information with them.

As black holes no longer need to leak information back into space, but can now release it in a final burst when they have fully evaporated, there is no need to have a firewall and an infalling observer will again have a roast-free ride into the black hole.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2014-01-grey-black-hole-stephen-hawking.html#jCp