Rethinking the relational database

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What?

So what if large amounts of data lies around fallow for years at a time? Data is certainly backed up to other storage media, so it never truly goes away, and you can always move data to storage older than a certain date if you're worried about clogging up your database.

But the true strength of the relational database is that it doesn't care how much data you have. As long as that data is laid out in a logical, connected format, with proper keys and indexes, great gobs of it may be ignored for long periods until it is required. and lets face facts: storage space has been increasing at unheard of rates for some time as more and more data is squeezed into smaller and smaller packets.

What happens come the day you need all that "old" data to do some long-term analysis of trends or to create a tracking map of past movement? Are you then going to have to import that data back into the database from some other format just to run your queries, only to dump it back out again when you're done?

The RDBMS system has been around a long time owing to its logical underpinnings and ease of use for connecting large amounts of seemingly disparate data into useable forms. Unless the author has come up with some new database architecture which will revolutionize the field, she had best stick to what she knows.

Posted by: Billosaur   Posted on: 05/24/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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