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

Generalizing too much?

[bogaboga]

-- but most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers.

Not when my credit rating is at stake! OR, When an airline agent is mistaking me to be a member of Al Qaida, and therefore denying me a seat on the plane.

In these cases I want *exact* answers to everything time related.

The clowns down the hall

[tyates]

Queues? Workflows? Business logic? Excuse me for thinking that a database should just store data. I guess that makes me a caveman or something.
He didn't mention the biggest problem with databases - it's that the clowns down the hall (the DBAs and sysadmins) own it and you don't. I've seen teams store their data in flat files just because they didn't want to deal with those bozos.