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The Future of Databases
gManZboy writes "Ever wonder where database technology is going? This is something that Turing award winner Jim Gray from Microsoft has given a lot of thought to. He recently published an article in which he looks at the many forces pushing database technologies forward, and what those new technologies will look like. Gray writes, 'the greatest of these [research challenges] will have to do with the unification of approximate and exact reasoning. Most of us come from the exact-reasoning world -- but most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers.'"
most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers
Bioinformatics databases are a good example of this. DNA and protein sequence databases are often searched by approximate string-matching algorithms based on "dynamic programming" to hidden Markov models and other stochastic grammars.
Historically, drug target-hunters in Big Pharma created a market for accelerated hardware to facilitate dynamic programming searches, some of which (e.g. Paracel's Fast Data Finder chip) was originally marketed to government agencies who, um, shared an interest in approximate string-matching ;)
> The "next great advancement" in databases will be when I can setup 2 or more linux servers and have
>them act as a single database server. Our database server is the most expensive item in our datacenter
>because it's an N-way IBM server.
lol, IBM has supported *exactly* what you are talking about for at least five years.
That is, you can spread your db2 database across 10,100, or 1000+ linux commodity boxes (ideally blades). Or you can use windows, or aix, or solaris, or hp-ux, etc. Of course, those individual boxes can be SMPs in their own right - so a thousand 8-way aix boxes is certainly possible, if not cheap.
Oracle is now in this game as well - oracle 10g can certainly support 32, and maybe 64 individual linux boxes in a cluster. The techniques are different between the two - oracle might be better at transactional systems. db2 is definitely better at data warehousing, data mining, etc.
Of course, there are still benefits to a big smp: a single P570 16-way will cost you $250k. But each of those 16 cpus is multi-code (and far faster than intel or amd), and with its micro-partitioning - it can run at least 150 linux or aix lpars (logical partitions). These lpars can grow or shink as they need - so you aren't always over-buying for size, buying new hardly-used hardware, or having to colocate apps on a busy server - when a different os would be preferable. Not to say everyone should go this way - but there are definite benefits.