isn't this already implemented in Datawarehouse appliances like Netezza (now part of IBM), which targeted solving the problem of analytical queries on huge sets of data??
I guess Baidu hired some former Netezza guys and they decided to copy/steal from their former company to meet with their KPIs,which is quite common here in China
Ahh yes, my old boss was next door neighbours with the Netezza CEO back in the early days circa '06. I worked a little with the platform back then, and i saw this article and was like, thats they they did! Back then, u had to shard ur database to take advantage of the parrallel processing, not sure how far its come now.