
The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us) - wheels
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/32212-the-end-of-a-dbms-era-might-be-upon-us/fulltext
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mdasen
These articles are getting really fashionable lately, but the thing is that
for many applications, a relational store is what fits your model. And RDBMS
systems scale for most purposes. The things that don't scale are basically
things that other systems don't have as features.

Key-value stores: you can only query by the key. So, you can say "give me
article 7", but you can't say "give me articles by author 5". That's a huge
limitation and doesn't allow you to make many applications. Now, key-value
stores definitely have their place. For some purposes, they allow you to get
better speed and scalability. However, I wouldn't want to be running my whole
site off it alone.

Column based databases: these are wonderful for data warehousing and map-
reduce like operations. However, that comes at a cost, namely random access.
If your data is stored as 1,John;2,Adam;3,Samantha;4,Amanda you're easily able
to grab all the columns for a person. However, if it's stored (as in a column
database) as 1,2,3,4;John,Adam,Samantha,Amanda it becomes difficult to
reconstitute a random row since the data isn't stored together. And what are
you likely to be doing with your web application? Sure, I might want to
analyze all the values in a column sometimes, but more often than not, I'm
going to want to get the data for a row.

This isn't the end of the RDBMS. It's just more useful and a better tool for a
lot of what we do. And we don't just have to use one tool. We can easily use
key-value stores to supplement an RDBMS where the key-value store is a better
tool - like caching. There's a reason that RDBMS systems are so widely used on
high-profile sites including to power Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress.com
(the 4th, 7th, and 20th most visited sites on the web worldwide). An RDBMS
isn't the only tool they use, but it's good at data storage that needs to be
accessed randomly. Sure, it needs to be supplemented by other techniques when
you get to high volume so that operations that don't need an RDBMS don't use
it, but there's a reason that Flickr, Craigslist, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn,
del.icio.us, LiveJournal, StumbleUpon, and many more of the largest sites use
them.

~~~
dagheti
I think the article is (as titled) about the end of _a_ era, not _the_ era. I
don't think this article is saying the RDBMS is dead (the author works for
Vertica, which I believe is a column-store RDBMS). He is saying that the era
of the "row based physical model for everyone" era is over.

Ideally a RDBMS should have logical-physical seperation, and be able to
support both row and column based stores (or any physical strategy at all) in
the same DB. I think the author is just saying that the next stage on this
path will have various competing RDBMS physical implementation strategies as
they have such big performance impacts.

I don't think that these different storage method DBMS's are the end point,
but a way point to RDBMS technology that can mix physical strategies while
keeping the logical relational model intact.

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edw519
The End of Flamebait (Might be Upon Us)

Am I the only one who is getting tired of, "I found a new thing! The old thing
is dead!"

Pretty much everything I've ever needed to do was easily accomplished with a
DBMS with alternate indexing, either BTree or bitmap transaction. If I run
into a jam, I'd be glad to take a look at additional options. I won't get rid
of my DBMS any sooner than I'd get rid of my car just because of the advent of
the personal helicopter.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Normally, I'd agree with you.

Except here, the guy who is saying "the old thing is dead!" is one of the guys
who _invented_ the "old thing."

Stonebraker was among the first to implement a functioning relational
database, and I don't think you can underestimate the importance of the Ingres
papers to the field.

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Paul_Morgan
He's marketing his variations on the RDBMS - Vertica/C-Store, VoltDB & SciDB.
Twelve years ago he was talking about Object Relational databases supplanting
the RDBMS.

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va_coder
Are the new non-SQL databases agile? As my users require new ways to query and
glean information from the data, will they grow with it? I'm not sure. What if
down the road my users want to perform join-like behavior, aggregates and
other things that SQL does so well?

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forinti
Let's wait for the end of hierarchical databases first...

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TweedHeads
Tell that to Walmart.

RDBMS era will never end as long as corporations need to store data
efficiently.

Most web pages don't need the power of a RDBMS and they go well enough with
whatever is fashionable.

An invoice is a row, a purchase order is a row, an employee paycheck is a row,
a product is a row, etc.

