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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.'"
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
In my opinion, the future of databases is nothing so complicated as pitched here -- but rather a move to simpler, more reliable back ends where the filesystem is the database. This is certainly the vision pitched by Hans Reiser and reiserfs, which aims to put more database like intelligence within the filesystem. So you eliminate extra unnecessary layers that just eat up resources and create fragile databases.
Data is data. Just data. Save it, read it, sort it how you like. Efficient results mean having rapid, low-latency access to data.
... except that you still do, because SQL isn't a way of avoiding logical errors. ... and that they still don't save time. At best, they allow for some parallelism, external access to the data, and a separation of concerns.
Add code to it, and you have data+code.
OF course, code is data, and thus data can be treated as code, and handled by other code. LISP does this moderately well.
But you can't avoid the fact that, as it stands, databases are just engines for keeping your data structures outside your code, or when you add code to them, engines for reading your data structure for you so that you don't have to think about how to do it.
I'm getting rather tired of the fad that databases should be tacked on to everything, ranging from a shopping list to guidance systems. When did adding overhead become the mark of skill?
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.