These days buzz is all about Big Data. But where is my data and what happened to database technology? Ain’t all the business critical applications powered by database? In terms of importance for the business continuity, it is the database technology that is carrying the day.
Till recently, picking up database for your applications was fairly easy. Though there are choices to be made from among the database vendors, they were all within the same category of RDBMS. Application design and skill set requirements were more or less within a given domain of RDBMS. You could argue about price, support and some features of each database vendor but you did not have to think outside the realms of RDBMS architecture.
This scenario suddenly has changed. A new dimension to database needs has arisen. In fact even the type of data that needs to be collected, stored and analysed is vastly different than the data that was being generated and processed by RDBMS. On top of it, this new data type is equally important for the business needs and can not be ignored.
Now the CIOs have to pay equal attention to technology of these new data types. The needs have not stopped here, there is more to this data – the need for analyzing it and at a volume that was not imagined before. So one more dimension has been added to already challenging requirements.
Thus these needs can be broadly categorized as – RDBMS, NoSQL and Hadoop file system.
Very often we find the discussions where the CIO’s are debating RDBMS vs NoSQL vs Hadoop. We find CIOs worried about having different types of data management systems in their architecture. They seem to be looking at these technologies from a traditional database point of view, when actually these technologies have evolved to satisfy different types and different needs. I would like to argue that CIOs need to embrace these technologies harmoniously. Time has come when instead of looking one vs another, CIOs need to discuss holistic architecture where every type of database technology exists to complement each other. It is a different world now. There are categories of database system and within each category there are multiple vendors. So instead of asking for comparison of database system across different categories, CIOs should ask how each database vendor makes the harmonization easier.
So instead of thinking “this vs that”, think how I can make use of “This and That” in my database technology world.
Interesting times are ahead.