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Loading ...Relational databases are not all relative
There’s no better way to launch a new blog than to declare someone or something irrelevant, dead, or at least dying. Such is the success strategy of The Database column, which purports to be written “by the experts, for the experts.” I can’t say the experts at Oracle, IBM or any other expert employed by a database vendor are going to be pleased with one of the first postings, though.
In “One size fits all — a time whose come and gone,” Michael Stonebreaker )(right) essentially writes off the relational database as we know it today. As the co-creator of Ingres, he has the bona fides to make such a statement, and his post has the sweeping grandeur of a throw-down, or the announcement of a clean slate:
“The world of 2007 is radically different from the world of the late 1970s. However, none of the major vendors have performed a complete redesign to deal with this changed landscape,” he writes. “As such they should be considered legacy technology, more than a quarter of century in age and ‘long in the tooth.’”
Stonebreaker’s prescription for change isn’t radical — he suggests column-oriented databases will displace those that store data in successive rows — but he highlights the fact that the changes will likely come from the business intelligence needs of the enterprise. Even today, a lot of databases are just repositories. Eventually, the word “relational” might start to seem more appropriate.
September 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
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