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."

4 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. new record by hguorbray · · Score: 5, Interesting

    that's efficient -a summary that refutes the inflammatory headline

    I'm just sayin'

  2. Enough with the death of the relational DB by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This same basic story keeps getting submitted from the same group of people who are generally trying to sell non-relational-DB stuff. This is an ad. Move along.

  3. Not buying it. by reginaldo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In theory, I agree the most costly actions in a database are joins. It seems like the key/value model is a great solution to this, on the surface. However, what the key/value model does is push the cost to the application layer. Instead of ensuring relational integrity and conformity in the database, suddenly all app code has to do this on the frontend. Also, instead of managing this process in a single place, suddenly this process is distributed among multiple methods. Sure, the DB is more scaleable, but suddenly the app is a mess.

  4. Re:Yes, but not soon. by photon317 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, these newer simple key/value databases like BigTable and CouchDB are effectively a subset of RDBMS functionality, so of course the same thing can be implemented relationally by just not using features.

    The reason these projects have taken off is that the relational features being skipped comprise most of the complexity of an RDBMS. Without them, it's relatively trivial to write new database engines from scratch instead of re-using MySQL, PostgreSQL, and so-on. These new feature-poor rewrites can take on many challenges that are harder for the big relational guys, like stellar performance on huge datasets, and being truly distributed in nature.

    --
    11*43+456^2