Hi Markus,
It was clearly not built for interactive operation
On the contrary, it is: imagine applications in the browser that react when each result comes in. Don't focus on the total time, focus on the results streaming in.
Web querying takes time, especially in a federated setting. The whole idea of TPF is that it's going to take time, so better to do something interactively while waiting.
The old query paradigm "ask, wait, do" is just not fit for the Web. For querying on the open Web, it is "ask, do as the results come in".
but analytical queries do not seem to return results at all.
TPF is not built for analysis at all. For heavy analyses of anything, I would suggest anyone to just download the data and host your own server. TPF is for live querying of multiple sources on the Web.
it is probably too early to say if it could one day be a real alternative to the production-grade solutions that the community has produced already.
Point taken. I just wished the community produced Web-grade solutions ;-)
Cheers,
Ruben