Stepping Up in Class
Midtier database vendors finding their customers need same heavy-lifting functionality as larger organizations
By Shari L. Gold
July 1, 2005 —
(Page 1 of 5)
A trend is emerging among midtier database vendors: Their customers want high-end functionality without the installation, maintenance and financial responsibilities it demands. The problem lies in the fact that these organizations often do not have the means to hire dedicated database administrators and developers.
Some of the leading midtier vendors see the demand to compete with the functionality offered by IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to be their greatest challenge. Where issues such as service-oriented architectures, Radio Frequency Identification, regulatory compliance and larger data storage capacity once were the sole province of large companies, the smaller midtier users now also must deal with these new demands.
These companies, noted Brendan Coveney, president and CEO of 4D, will be “hit with so much data in the near future.” 4D offers 4th Dimension, a database for Mac OS X and Windows.
That mountain of data, according to Tony Gaughan, vice president of development at Computer Associates, creates levels of complexity smaller organizations haven’t had to deal with before. “The most significant problem that application developers face today, and why the better portion of application development efforts fail, is the massive complexity associated with the number of components that are involved in even the most rudimentary systems,” he said.
The days of knowing one database and one supporting language are over. Today, developers need to be familiar with legacy, relational and object databases on the back end, and they need to have detailed knowledge of application servers, Web servers, scripting languages and even more for the middle tier. Thick- and thin-client technologies, Web services, XML, WSDL and HTML also are on the list of must-knows. Database developers need to master all of these technologies to be successful.
“The number of different types of application architectures is frightening,” said Gaughan.
OPEN ALTERNATIVES
One way midtier database vendors Computer Associates and Sleepycat Software reduce the learning curve is by offering standards-based, open-source alternatives to the “Big Three”—IBM’s DB2, Microsoft’s SQL Server and Oracle 10g. Database developers need the flexibility of writing applications for one platform that can be deployed effortlessly against any other platform, said Gaughan.
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