Joerg Plewe's Blog

Will federate databases die out?

These days I'm fooling around with some database technologies.

Just one thing came to my mind when I was observing my own daily work. Do I query federate databases often? No, I don't. Instead I use google. That's my standard query tool and it is really powerful. Everybody does. Nobody can live without any more.

Today, federate databases are the backbone of most applications. They maintain prestructured data to answer prestuctured queries leading to prestructured results in fixed-form user frontends (well, roughly :) ).

Maybe even more valuable data (or should I say knowlegde) floats around in zillions of Word documents, presentations, emails. Nobody reads them. Some smart companies already started to install internal search engines maybe complemented by taxonomy/classification engines in even smarter companies. Will they be able to replace federate databases one day?

On starship Enterprise, the question 'What do we know about planet Omega-Haribo7?' can be answered giving exactly the information the questioner wanted. Lifeforms, atmosphere, latest wars. I'm pretty sure it's not just some voice recognition combined with a MySQL server to get that done.

Will the future decide the battle between OODBMS and RDBMS against both? Will unstructured information be the key for future enterprise databases? Will GUI-forms vanish? Will this - in the end - lead to completely new paradigms in programming languages, databases, UI ...? Just a thought before weekend.

Comments

• We only started at making data available worldwide and we are already facing the fate of capitalism:
  Anarchic data distribution is not possible because it immediately gets misused by people that fool the ranking system because of their commercial interests.

  I think you are completely wrong. Specialised databases will be everywhere, even in devices where you don't imagine them to be today. The fastest access to data is still provided by databases.

  Try to find the following information with Google: "Who was the 8th best Formula1 driver in 1973 and how many points did he have after the third race?"

  We will need a common global object model that will let you describe the above query and let you run it against any database.

  We will need an object querying standard.

  For the use in applications I think I have found it yesterday, linked here.

  I have been looking for such an elegant solution for 10 years.
  Best, Carl
  --
  Carl Rosenberger
  Chief Software Architect
  db4objects Inc.
  http://www.db4o.com
  

  Posted by: carlrosenberger on March 04, 2005 at 04:38 PM

• Carl: James Hunt, 14 points. Query Google with "formula 1 1973", 4th result. No need to search a build or search a database for that.

  Posted by: fkorf on March 07, 2005 at 07:15 AM

• I guess google will become the Oracle of tomorrow then. Interesting.

  Posted by: dog on March 07, 2005 at 07:38 AM

• Maybe its not Google but some other vendor. Searching alone will not do the job. 'F1 1973' + some automatic classification that finds out there is a thing like 'ranking' ... this might get pretty close to a highly specific query today.

  Still talking about the far future of course.

  Posted by: herkules on March 07, 2005 at 08:13 AM

• Or you could consider W3C XQuery - you can quickly federate multiple relational data sources as XML views, or integerate a set of XML documents or web services.

  I talk more about what I think the promise of XQuery below...

  -Jonathan Bruce
  DataDirect Technologies
  http://blogs.datadirect.com/

  Posted by: jonbruce on March 07, 2005 at 12:17 PM

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