Database 2.0

For a long time (decades I believe) it seemed like the General purpose Database was the silver bullet. Object Oriented Databases tried to take the shine away from RDBMS , but only to strengthen the notion that RDBM’S do best at what they are supposed to do – Store , Query and Update Data.

The application development world adjusted to the notion that the Object Relational mismatch is a reality and instead of fighting it let us work with the RDBMS systems and make world a better place. Tools like Hibernate had great success because they accepted the strengths of RDBMS as compared to competing technologies at that time like EJB's . The Enterprise was also caught up in the ERP wave where everything in the Enterprise needed to have a predefined structure, vocabulary established etc.

2007 brought some interesting changes in the DB world. Web 2.0 brought the concepts of self organization , realization that all information does not reside in-house , that everything cannot be structured , that Information Management is not just EDW / BI - there is a whole world out there with unstructured information and Semantic Web . Consequently SQL and RDBMS is not the silver bullet.

2007 also brought some interesting DB’s to the forefront including SimpleDB , BigTable , HP Neoview , CouchDB each of these serving very different purposes finetuned for particular needs.

So the definition of Database 2.o in my opinion is that it is the realization that all information in the Enterprise cannot be out in the Corporate RDBMS , cannot be structured and that there can and will be multiple datasources to information (within and outside the firewall)

So what is my point ?

I think the Database market is splitting into two layers
1. The general purpose database market - now turning out to be a commodity market
2. The specialized DB market

So finally I would like to close on the trigger that got me to think the above - The mysql acquisition by sun – Why does sun need a database product NOW ? it has severe wall street issues and convincing the market of buyout of a company that gives away free products is going to amazingly difficult.

Here is the answer I came up with .
With the technology and engineering capability needed to build a general purpose database generally available – Building a high performance RDBMS system that competes with the likes of Oracle and DB2 does not seem like a very big challenge. So if competing on price and brand are your differentiator's in the general purpose DB market then what better way to compete by giving the product free.

Now monetization on mysql and revenue potential is a separate discussion. My discussion above is keeping the number of deployments in mind.

more reasons for the Sun / mqsql acquisition