Gartner on “The Death of the Database”
Gartner had a recent conference session on “The Death of the Database,” as described in David Berlind’s and Kathy Somebodyorother’s blogs. The core idea was that data in the future might be stored closest to where it would need to be used, which might not be in a traditional DBMS.
Before getting to the real meat of that, let me push back at some of the extremist boobirds. First, I doubt the analysts really talked about “the intersection of a row and a tuple”; it’s much more likely that that is a misquote due to reporting error. Second, their claim that BI will switch from being an “application” to a “service” is not at all unreasonable. BI should never have been viewed as an application; it’s much more a collection of application-enabling technologies. And the analysts explicitly said that DBMS will continue to be useful for analytics. As for their claim that some data needs to be only briefly persistent — they’re absolutely right, but let me defer that point to a separate post on memory-centric OLTP.
All that said — while a lot of their points ring true, it sounds as if they overstated their case in one important area. They’re making it sound as if some of today’s OLTP databases will no longer be needed, and as if tomorrow’s new kinds of OLTP data won’t need to be at least partly persisted to conventional DBMS. Wrong and wrong. Every important transaction needs to wind up in a DBMS. Those DBMS may not be as centralized as previously thought. The data may be copied to non-DBMS data stores (or, more likely, kept in a lightweight local DBMS and copied from there to serioius OLTP database). These DBMS may use native XML rather than traditional tabular data structures. But at the end of the day, transactional databases will continue to be needed for all the reasons they’ve been necessary in the past.
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