What’s the Shape of
Databases to Come?
Mike Carey
Myopic Industrial Attendee
Bronco Acquisition Corporation
(a.k.a. BOracle)
For Years We Have Enjoyed
The Great Convergence
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In the beginning there was data
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And then along came Ted Codd
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Files – bytes, ISAM, VSAM
Prehistoric Databases – hierarchical (IMS), network
(CODASYL)
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!
Several “Post-Relational” DB
Movements Have Failed
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Object-oriented database systems
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Object-relational database systems
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Mostly throughout the 1990’s
OO concepts + RDBMS features = OR DBMS
Semi-structured (XML) database systems
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Mid-1980’s to mid-1990’s
OO languages + DBMS features = OO DBMS
Late-1990’s to early-2000’s
Schema-last/schema-never + complex data = XML DBMS
None of these movements seriously took hold
The World Is Flat, Right?
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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 wellbeing of our members, we have slowly but steadily been
spreading the news.”
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“But why? Why do we say the Earth is flat, when the vast
majority says otherwise? Because we know the truth.”
Let’s Have A Look At Where
We Are Today
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Core business data management
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Relational DBs & SQL work as designed
Applications and application data
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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
Let’s Have A Look At Where
We Are Today (cont.)
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Relational DBs & SQL not looking so good
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Glorified record-based file system (VSAM++)
Data semantics not captured in the RDB schema
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Encoded in the application, or
Encoded as more data, understood by the application
We are losing the data’s model & its meaning!
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Maybe we need a different modeling approach?
Maybe we need domain-specific DBMSs?
Or maybe we need <your ideas go here>?