Recently in Database miscellaneous Category

The Resource Description Format (RDF) is a way to describe information about relationships between entities and objects. It was originally developed by the W3C as a way to describe information about resources on the Web. It is intended to be the data model used in the Semantic Web, where web pages contain not just text but also structured records describing the data they contain and the relationships in that data. In this post, Sam Madden and Daniel Abadi discuss RDF and database issues. Continue reading "Relational databases for storing and querying RDF" »

Consolidation within the Business Intelligence (BI) market continues. After more than a dozen acquisitions made by Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion over the past few years, these BI tools/analytics industry leaders were themselves snapped up in a matter of months by SAP, IBM, and Oracle respectively. But economies of scale enabled by consolidation is just one of the two primary drivers of the new economics of BI. Jerry Held explains how the other driver is economies of innovation that is a result of the continuing stream of new entrants. Continue reading "The new economics of the BI market" »

"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" »

Mike Stonebraker offers his personal highlights of VLDB 2007, including a historical note on RDBMS design, the need to improve database administration interfaces, new capabilities and tools from Yahoo!, and some thoughts on the OLPC project. Continue reading "Thoughts on the VLDB conference" »

Ten years after its publication, Mitch Cherniack looks at the relevancy and applicability of the "The Database Warehouse Toolkit." He discusses four issues that he contends reveal the deficiencies of traditional relational row-store OLTP engines when used for data warehouse applications. Continue reading "Reflections on the Kimball Data Warehouse "Bible": Time for a New Testament?" »