goodbye RDBMs
The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)
[Via Wesley Felter]
With CouchDB gaining traction, and the recent paper on Dynamo, it feels like people everywhere are dropping their relational databases. Are the database vendors going to figure this out, and change their products in time to matter?
October 4th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Well I really don’t know anything about Databases but the answer to your question will be no. They will not change their products. The approach they will take is to buy up the new technologies [bdb anyone?].
October 4th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Yeah. I guess that was a silly question. Big companies don’t innovate, they buy little companies
October 4th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Hi Paul.
Databases were never designed to be a panacea to the world’s computing problems. You use the right tools for the right tasks.
Storing all the posts in the blogosphere is obviously the wrong task for a DB — especially when you need to do full text indexing for searching, and the R in RDBMS goes completely unused.
Storing products, orders, customers, etc — the kind of data you cross-reference all the time — requires a database. You could do it with bdbs.. but you’d just wind up writing a database on top of them. Heck, iirc MySQL uses bdb as one of its internal storage engines.
The right tool for the right job.
Also, you know full well big companies innovate. Amazon didn’t buy Dynamo
October 4th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Big companies innovate in technology, in general yes. Mostly because they have enough spare cycles to spend on research projects and they also have needs that no other small company has.
On the right tool for the right job: yes, but my opinion is that RDBMS right now are used in way too many places — and even places with Products, Customers, and Orders should really take a hard look at why they are using an RDBMs