Relational databases are dead
Okay, I’m overstating things a bit. But Aimee captures the coming evolution of the database perfectly:
In my mind, the database has gone from being the most important thing to being just a method of persistence for the data in the domain model.
I believe that this revelation, which more and more developers are having, will be very healthy for application design.
It will probably also be very bad for RDBMS companies. But RDBMS vendors can take comfort in the fact there will always be a place for relational databases in projects that have strongly-typed and well-structured data for which consistency is more important than availability.1 MySQL might prove me wrong, though — they seem to be doing some lateral thinking. I have to applaud any RDBMS vendor that is willing to promote a session entitled SQL is dead at its conference.2
1 No, I can’t think of any examples, either.
2 Again with the sensational titles. Of course, SQL is not really dead — Amazon’s addition of a SQL-like syntax to SimpleDB shows that there is a significant demand for a familiar (if not quite standard) query language.
Good to hear your opinions. The future is definitely looking very good for CouchDB! :)
aimee.mychores.co.uk
April 14, 2009 at 2:06 pm