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07 02 2007

The RDBMS God…..

Posted by Dan Creswell in Distributed Systems, Enterprise Systems, Technology

…..has been worshipped for a long time but there are various barbarian enclaves that are not ready to kneel before him.

Enterprises certainly want the money saving opportunities of utility computing options such as EC2 but there is evidence to suggest that RDBMS’en aren’t cut out for this role.

And recent statements on TSS suggest some people are at least beginning to think that we are mis-using RDBMS’en ignoring it’s lack of suitability to a task because it’s an easy option.

Time to seek a new religion?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Distributed Systems, Enterprise Systems, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “The RDBMS God…..”
  1. Kerr says:
    February 7, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    You might want to give CouchDB a quick look to see somethign different out there.

    http://couchdb.com/

    It’s built using erlang and designed from the ground up to be distributed.

    From the Couch DB project Wiki:

    What CouchDb is
    * A document database server, accessible via a RESTful XML api.
    * Ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space.
    * Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and management.
    * Query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine with a simplified formula query language.

    What it is not
    * A relational database.
    * A replacement for relational databases.
    * An object-oriented database. Or more specifically, meant to function as a seamless persistence layer for an OO programming language.
    * A XML/XQuery database

    Distributed

    CouchDb is built from the start with a consistent vision of a distributed document database system. Unlike cumbersome attempts to bolt distributed features on top of the same legacy models and databases, it is the result of careful ground-up design, engineering and integration. The document, view, security and replication models, the special purpose query language, the efficient and robust disk layout are all carefully integrated for a reliable and efficient system.

  2. james governor says:
    February 8, 2007 at 5:16 pm

    of course RDBMS isn’t suitable for everything. but as an industry we constantly embrace reductionism, before expanding out again, in waves something like evolution. hierarchical and flat file databases have their place.

    i would say we should avoid seeking a new religion unless its a pantheistic one. the judeo-christian tradition makes us believe in one true god, which is quite limiting. what not have different gods, and databases, for diffferent niches? please excuse taking your point literally, but i just got off a plane so my brain may be a bit addled.

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