Not your daddy's database
November 15, 2009 —
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Databases aren't just for DBAs anymore. With an increasing number of new database projects in the open-source world, and with new thinking around cloud-hosted databases, the relatively dull world of storing data has come to life again. New research into scalability, reliability and availability are changing what it means to develop an application on top of a database.
Developing cloud applications on top of virtually hosted databases has created an entirely new set of problems for developers. Database optimization has become an art form, usually the domain of the DBA. But with cloud-hosted databases, such as Amazon's SimpleDB and Microsoft's forthcoming cloud-hosted version of Microsoft SQL Server, the information typically used to judge the usefulness of optimization actions is no longer living in the logs of a company's servers.
The relational database is still vitally important, but there are green shoots abound in the world of non-relational databases. The necessity of speed and scalability in the cloud has spawned dozens of new projects, commercial and otherwise. Projects like CouchDB, Drizzle, MongoDB and Tokyo Cabinet all tackle specific areas of need in modern development environments.
The biggest reason for the move to amorphous blobs of unformatted data is, perhaps, sheer exhaustion. For years, much of enterprise software development has been preoccupied with integrating data, formatting it properly, moving it between databases and preparing it for processing. With new systems like Hadoop adding facilities for normalizing and crunching data in general, the need to build individual data connectors would seem to be destined for the scrap heap.
Of course, clouds also imply scaling, and scaling databases is still not an easy proposition. Thus the need for large key value stores, like Tokyo Cabinet, that focus on this singular task and eliminate the need to run a database with oodles of unneeded features. Pure key value stores lack the potential for SQL injection attacks, while amorphous blobs of data require little data normalization.
All this movement outside of the database, however, gives developers more wiggle room. With less need for squeezing square relational databases into round development holes, developers can focus on the things relational databases do well within their applications.
Related Search Term(s): Amazon, databases, Hadoop
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