Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Is the Relational Database Doomed?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the just-more-tools-in-the-bucket dept.

DB Guy writes "There's an article over on Read Write Web about what the future of relational databases looks like when faced with new challenges to its dominance from key/value stores, such as SimpleDB, CouchDB, Project Voldemort and BigTable. The conclusion suggests that relational databases and key value stores aren't really mutually exclusive and instead are different tools for different requirements."

2 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. This is an old argument which will not fly by bogaboga · · Score: 5, Informative

    It has been suggested before that the life of the relational DB is coming to an end. I must say that while I agree with this statement: -

    Relational databases scale well, but usually only when that scaling happens on a single server node. When the capacity of that single node is reached, you need to scale out and distribute that load across multiple server nodes. This is when the complexity of relational databases starts to rub against their potential to scale.

    I disagree with the following statement: -

    Try scaling to hundreds or thousands of nodes, rather than a few, and the complexities become overwhelming, and the characteristics that make RDBMS so appealing drastically reduce their viability as platforms for large distributed systems.

    I submit that the complexity can be managed and that's why we have jobs.

    I am an IT consultant at a major bank and we keep all kinds of data. Data that many find useless and is spread across 27 [major] nodes. Total records in our biggest table number about 57 million with 49 rows. I can tell you that data querying and integrity maintaining are a breeze if the schematic design is correct in the first place.

    We are always designing and testing different scenarios. In cases where we have had to change the schema, it has been simple if one knows what to do.

    I must say that Open Source DBs have worked for us though we rely on products from IBM and Oracle.

    Our philosophy is: If it works in PostgreSQL, it will even do wonders on DB2 or Oracle. I do not see how we can do away with the relational DB. Whoever designed it in the beginning did a marvelous job.

  2. Re:Yes, but not soon. by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually i read TFA, and I just couldnt make sense of the benefits offered by the key value thing. You basically should be able to get the same benefits with a relational database system with a query that does a lookup on a single column index. This would involve searching the b-tree for that column, which would yield a row data address of some sort, to either a linked list of cells or a list of addresses of those cells. Once the single b-tree is done it is then very fast to find the other column values in that row. The b-tree or other index lookup also has to be done with the key value pair, the relational is just a collection of multiple key value indexes.

    There is the issue of having a variable number of pieces of data linked to a certain key. But you can do this in relational too. Just create a table with an id column, value type column and value column. A well designed relational, if you do a query on the id column, the b-tree will lead to data which has all of the row data addresses in the database that match the id. EAch of those rows will contain a different data type/data payload for the id. This is again pretty much as fast as a simple single index database.