
Stonebraker: Send Relational DBMSs to the Home for Tired Software - mblakele
http://marklogic.blogspot.com/2009/07/stonebraker-send-relational-dbmss-to.html
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Femur
You know, every couple of weeks an article like this comes up on HN or
Slashdot predicting the end of the RDBMS. I don't deny that special purpose
data stores can offer great performance improvements in some applications. But
there is a reason that RDBMSs are celebrating their 40th birthday (as the
article mentions). They are flexible, cheap (except for Oracle and DB2) and
easy to manage.

My guess is that we will still be reading about the imminent death of the
relational database another 40 years from now.

~~~
michael_dorfman
You could be right. But Stonebraker is not "just another guy" predicting the
end of the era of the RDBMS. He's one of the guys who _invented_ the RDBMS. If
he thinks he's seen something better, well, I think it's worth at least taking
a look.

~~~
gaius
He is _selling_ something (he claims to be) better - Vertica.

I've no comment either way on whether it is, and I know who Stonebraker is and
respect what he's done, but he has a vested interest here. Just like Netscape
programmers needed to kill off their earlier work, Mosaic.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I agree. And he's been selling post-relational stuff for a while-- this is not
a new observation on his part.

I'm not going to form an opinion on his word alone, but he's got big enough
chops in my book to warrant taking what he says seriously, even if he has a
vested interest.

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SkyMarshal
As long as they don't throw out the underlying idea that data can be
deconstructed then reorganized into a form that adheres to mathematic
principles, set theory and predicate logic in the case of RDBMS's, and from
that you can perform logical operations on it that allow you to derive new,
additional information from it. I think that was the major breakthrough of
Relational Theory, hopefully that is built on, rather than thrown out.

Speaking of which, Chris Date, Hugh Darwen and some others were talking about
a significant extension or evolution of the relational database, called the
transrelational database, several years ago. Anyone heard of any progress on
that front lately?

~~~
mblakele
This? <http://www.dbms2.com/2005/11/12/transrelational-23/>

~~~
SkyMarshal
Ah, too bad. Thx.

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tophat02
Software Engineering would progress a lot farther as a discipline if we
weren't so preoccupied with throwing out the "old" to make room for the "new".

My definition of "legacy" code: code that is field-tested, has a low defect
rate, and generally works.

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spudlyo
This is just a brief summary of the Michael Stonebraker's piece "The End of a
DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us)" which appeared on HN a few days ago. As far as I
can tell it adds nothing new, am I missing something?

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sophacles
I think this article makes some good points. In fact there are times when I've
been very frustrated at the "We can't to better than RDBMS" attitude many
times. Particularly that time we were storing a tree in a table. Specialized
data stores are very neat.

I do however think there will always be a good place for the traditional
RDBMS. For instance, there are times when I'm creating that I don't know what
the layout of the data will need to be, and where the optimizations will be
most needed, so I back an app with Postgres. Should I need to expand later, it
will be easier as I have actual data to work with.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is: unless you know for sure that your
data will benefit from a different model (e.g. known performance needs, or a
better conceptual mapping), not using an RDBMS seems like a premature
optimizaton.

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seldo
It seems as a database engineer, I am going to have to bulk up my skills in
non-RDBMS technologies, even if just to be able to say "yes, I am very
familiar with <random non-SQL DBMS> and it's not an appropriate solution to
this problem".

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mlLK
I don't understand, I thought relational DBMS were left for the dogs many
years ago. . .<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbms#End_1970s_SQL_DBMS>

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dkarl
_In the online transaction processing (OLTP) market, a lightweight main memory
DBMS beats a row store by a factor of 50._

I'm confused -- what does main memory vs. row store have to do with relational
vs. non-relational?

~~~
gnaritas
Everything when you're talking about real world implementations and not some
abstract theory in your head.

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wheels
The actual article was already on here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680881>

