Re:Is the Relational Database Doomed?
by neilk on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:34PM
(#479236)
The future is probably going to be a mix. RDBMS are good for data integrity. The non-relational databases are great for distributing queries. I've seen some apps which use a slow, asynchronous RDBMS to supply denormalized 'documents' for the non-relational stores.
Mind you, the RDBMS could still make a comeback. The world is looking to non-relational because since 1998 or so, throwing multiple pieces of hardware and network capacity at the problem is cheaper than solving it all in one giant node or cluster. But maybe one day an off-the-shelf computer (perhaps with better concurrent programming techniques for multicore) will be able to handle all the queries you would ever want and have the bandwidth to match.
Also, just wondering; exactly how many organizations really need a distributed database? There are some top websites, like LinkedIn, that do it all in one giant node, and my guess is that even sites like Facebook have only a few hundred database shards, maybe a few thousand at most.
Re:Is the Relational Database Doomed?
by mooism2 on Thursday February 12, 2009 @07:51PM
(#479250)
I do wonder how many people on EC2 use SimpleDB because they need (or think they will need) the scalability, as opposed to thinking it's easier to code for, or simply just so they can avoid the drudgery of running their own RDBMS.
Mind you, the RDBMS could still make a comeback. The world is looking to non-relational because since 1998 or so, throwing multiple pieces of hardware and network capacity at the problem is cheaper than solving it all in one giant node or cluster. But maybe one day an off-the-shelf computer (perhaps with better concurrent programming techniques for multicore) will be able to handle all the queries you would ever want and have the bandwidth to match.
Also, just wondering; exactly how many organizations really need a distributed database? There are some top websites, like LinkedIn, that do it all in one giant node, and my guess is that even sites like Facebook have only a few hundred database shards, maybe a few thousand at most.