What

1
Whats the Shape of Databases to Come?

• Mike Carey
• Myopic Industrial Attendee
• Bronco Acquisition Corporation
• (a.k.a. BOracle)

2
For Years We Have Enjoyed The Great Convergence

• In the beginning there was data
• Files bytes, ISAM, VSAM
• Prehistoric Databases hierarchical (IMS),
  network (CODASYL)
• And then along came Ted Codd
• Relations and declarative queries
• Views, query optimization, transactions, ...
• SQL and the relational database market
• Resulted in a widely accepted field of knowledge
• Unquestionably a revolutionary change!

3
Several Post-Relational DB Movements Have Failed

• Object-oriented database systems
• Mid-1980s to mid-1990s
• OO languages DBMS features OO DBMS
• Object-relational database systems
• Mostly throughout the 1990s
• OO concepts RDBMS features OR DBMS
• Semi-structured (XML) database systems
• Late-1990s to early-2000s
• Schema-last/schema-never complex data XML
  DBMS
• None of these movements seriously took hold

4
The World Is Flat, Right?

• Quoting from the Flat Earth Society homepage
• Enter the Flat Earth Society. For over five
  hundred years humanity has believed the "round
  Earth" teachings of Efimovich and his followers.
  But all hope is not lost. For through all that
  time, a small but diligent band of individuals
  have preserved the knowledge of our planet's true
  shape. And now, after centuries in the Dark Ages,
  we believe that mankind as a whole is once again
  ready to embrace the truth that has forever been
  the Flat Earth Society. Using whatever means are
  deemed necessary and relying heavily on a callous
  disregard for the lives and well-being of our
  members, we have slowly but steadily been
  spreading the news.
• But why? Why do we say the Earth is flat, when
  the vast majority says otherwise? Because we know
  the truth.

5
Lets Have A Look At Where We Are Today

• Core business data management
• Relational DBs SQL work as designed
• Applications and application data
• SAP tables as transactional storage
• C/Java O-R tools tables as backend stores for
  mapped language objects
• MSFT EDM EntitySQL for ADO.NET
• MDM tables as backend stores for product data
  (for example) with a rich extensible data model
• SaaS tables as backend stores for multi-tenant
  data sets with tenant-extensible schemas

6
Lets Have A Look At Where We Are Today (cont.)

• Relational DBs SQL not looking so good
• Glorified record-based file system (VSAM)
• Data semantics not captured in the RDB schema
• Encoded in the application, or
• Encoded as more data, understood by the
  application
• We are losing the datas model its meaning!
• Maybe we need a different modeling approach?
• Maybe we need domain-specific DBMSs?
• Or maybe we need ltyour ideas go heregt?