Oh my. This is just immensely funny & sad at the same time - Amusing Database Videos http://www.bigdatabaselist.com/wiki/Amusing_Database_Videos

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The NoSQL event has triggered a bit of a hard time for the RDBMS the last week.  I won’t add any commentary as this follows what I have been talking about for a while, but here are some of the links.  Most notable is Michael Stonebraker’s post on the ACM site.

• The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us)
• Relational databases are dead -- who knew?
• …

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Todd Hoff has posted a link to a Los Alamos National Lab presentation on Graph Databases.  In this paper they provide a revisit on the classic RDBMS vs Graph database debate.

The Relational Database hasn’t maintained its dominance out of dumb luck.  Instead the RDBMS has consistently outperformed while providing the most general use capability of all the variety of platforms that have been available.  Many other approaches have been tried, often these have provided better object model integration (OODBMS) or better data model representation.  But when the …

The last 24 months has seen the introduction of Map/Reduce functionality into the data processing arena in various forms.  Map/Reduce is a framework for developing scalable data processing functionality, and was popularized by Google (see this earlier post).

Pure players like Hadoop are starting to find their own niche, helped by organizations such as Cloudera.  However there has been a number of for & against arguments relating to Map/Reduce functionality inside the database.

These arguments are now really serving a moot point.  Customers have recognized value in Map/Reduce prompting some (b)leading edge database vendors to introduce such …

A bit of fun for a Sunday.  Below is the list of my top 10 interesting companies in Data Management right now.  Interesting to me means doing new stuff and being somewhat disruptive, or have a “watch and see” quality about them.  Note this is about companies not data management applications. 

While I find a bunch of other data management applications interesting (PNUTS, Cassandra, Redis etc) these aren’t really encapsulated in a company with a go to market strategy.

10gen - They are making interesting noises not sure about delivery yet
Amazon – SimpleDB is neat, but not a grown up data platform yet
Aster Data – Doing funky things with Map/Reduce
GroovyChannel – Are they nuts, they have to change …

• Introduction
• The Problem with the Relational Database (Part 1 ) –The Deployment Model

I met with a friend of mine in New York recently who runs a credit card processing end-point company.  They specifically built their business around a non-relational database platform and feel they would have major issues had they chosen to build their business around a traditional …

The MySQL Conference & Expo will be upon us in another week.  Kaj (pictured above top middle in an negative sauna) is putting together a great keynote panel on Cloud computing and there will be many sessions on performance tuning and optimization. The keynotes look to continue in the tradition of having very strong speakers, this year featuring presentations from Karen Padir who now runs the overall MySQL development organization, as well as Mark Callaghan …

So it’s that time of year again when everyone puts out their predictions for the year ahead.  I think predictions are a bit of a waste of time because to be interesting predictions have to be big, but a year really isn’t all that long so actual changes over the course of 2009 are likely to be just small progressions.  So instead I have been thinking about the top issues that we face heading into 2009 and here is my Top 10 list for issues in Data Management.  In this post I avoid offering solutions to these issues, while I have several ideas on solutions these can be the subject of subsequent posts.

10 - Limits on Scalability

While scalability is on my list it is at number 10 because against popular belief, scalability is only an issue for a very small number of data based applications.  Almost all data based applications in use today can be scaled without major issue by increasing the underlying …

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Recently I have seen several articles about Solid State Drives (SSD) and some articles are picking 2009 to be the year of the SSD.  While I agree SSD’s will bring some great benefits in the years to come, I wanted to clarify the current state of SSD’s in relation to usage in the database field.  A primary misconception is that because SSD’s are a type of “memory chip” storage that they are super fast, like system RAM and using them to house a database will make the database super fast.  SSD’s are very different from system RAM because of course their data must be persisted and this requirement carries a major performance impact. 

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