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.'"

Comments

Bioinformaticists (and spies) use this a lot

[Dioscorea]

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 ;)