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Author: Chris Eaton I keep reading these articles over and over and over and it reminds me of when I was a kid. Back then people were saying that by the time I was old enough to drive there wouldn't be cars anymore. We would all be driving around in flying vehicles. I watched the Jetsons with delight imagining myself whizzing around the sky with my dog Astro at my side. Alas when I turned 16, to my disappointment I had to go to the department of motor vehicles and get my temporary car drivers license…what a bummer! Object oriented databases Well the same seems to be the case with IT. Ever since I started working with relational databases it seemed that something was always going to kill it off. First for me was object oriented databases (there were other things trying to kill of the RDBMS before my time). But alas the one track mindedness of the OODBMS just couldn't adapt to enough applications to make them mainstream. Sure there are lots of folks using OO databases out there but it certainly hasn't killed off relational database. In fact it caused RDBMs to adapt into the Object/Relational databases that appeared in the late 90s. DB2, Informix and Oracle all integrated object technology into their engines. There were a lot of rumblings in those days that the RDBMS days were numbered. XML only database engine Next was the XML only database engine. The world would soon be all XML and so XML only databases would take over the world and the RDBMS would be dead….NOT. In fact this has once again moved the RDBMs ball forward. DB2 9 with pureXML is a great example where the underlying data storage model in DB2 has been enhanced with a second/parallel storage engine for managing XML data (right alongside the relational storage model for managing rows). Now the well respected Mr. Michael Stonebreaker is implying that RDBMs can't cope with the needs of data warehousing and he is saying that his Vertica Systems Inc can solve the worlds query needs with a new column oriented database approach. The claim is that RDBMs were designed in the 1970s and can't change to handle today's query workloads like a column oriented database can. The funny part of this is that this is not the first database to try this. Sybase IQ has had column orientation for many years but never took the lead in the data warehousing space. The main problem with this approach is that it fails to consider the utility nature of databases these days and it doesn't handle the fact that people want databases for more than just query engines. Data warehouses Data warehouses that only handle query workload are declining in popularity in favor of more real time and dynamic data warehousing where the query systems are constantly being fed by transactional systems. Transactional type processing is becoming the norm on data warehousing systems. Warehouse queries are being put right into the transactional process so you need a warehouse system that can also handle huge volumes of insert/update/delete type transactions as well. IBM has been responding to this customer demand with their Dynamic Warehouse initiative. As well, the cost of software and hardware is miniscule compared to the cost of managing systems (people cost). So if you bring in a one trick pony you have to spend more money retraining your people to manage it (and you can't just stop the management of your other transactional systems and move them over to this warehouse RDBMs). Where I come from you don't see many Porshe Boxsters on the road. Why not? They can get you from point A to point B so much faster and the sure look nice and are loaded with luxuries (at least that's my impression, I don't have one). Why? Because I don't think they would handle Canadian winters very well and there isn't enough room to put my son and daughters hockey bags in the trunk and take then to the ice rink in the snow. I can't afford to have a car sit in my garage all winter so I choose cars that can do more than just go fast and look great.DB2 Similarly for DB2 you can use some of them for your transactional and your data warehouse needs and it's the same skill set externally. Inside there are different things going on because the engine has been architected to handle both types of workload. Mr. Stonebreaker may think the RDBMS is "legacy", but take a look at the innovation over even the past few releases in DB2 (deep compression, pureXML, cube views, STMM, Autonomics, etc) and then you add in the surrounding eco-system that supports the continued growth of relational databases (support for new and evolving programming models like Ruby, PHP, Perl as well as the older models like Java, C, .Net) and the enormous body of RDBMS professionals out there and I just don't see it declining anytime soon.
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