November 2007 Archives

Don Haderle responds to two commenters from his previous post about DBMS history. He notes that "You ask whether it's possible to render a single implementation of a DBMS that satisfactorily handles all usages (OLTP, analytics, ...) well enough such that we don't need another. I think not. Existing implementations work ... Someday the economics may change -- but not at present. So one leaves the existing system intact and moves the data to another system (e.g., columnar) to do analysis ..." Continue reading "Haderle responds to commenters regarding RDBMS history" »

Current relational database management systems are largely built on designs from the 1980s. Back then, computers were expensive and slow relative to today's systems. The minimization of expensive CPU cycles -- not I/O considerations -- was the driving force in early relational DBMS design. The market sweet spot was transaction... Continue reading "Once upon a time ... the origins of today's relational database architectures" »

"Big science" has problems with current database systems, including maintaining the consistency between the data and metadata, differing requirements for various projects, and the lack of automated lineage support. In this post, Michael Stonebraker discusses the underlying issues, notes previous attempts to solve the problems, and asks scientists to help the database research community develop a better DBMS that can support the needs of big science. Continue reading "Database management for "big science" applications" »