Earlier this month a database blog was established at www.databasecolumn.com as a platform for database luminaries such as Michael Stonebraker, Jerry Held and David Dewitt to share their thoughts on database technology and innovation. The prospect of hearing from these database giants on a regular basis caused great excitement in the database world and the first column, authored by Mike Stonebraker, has received tremendous coverage. Every time Mike Stonebraker forecasts the end of the RDBMS world it causes a stir. I remember quite vividly the stir that “Object Relational Dbms: Tracking the Next Great Wave” caused back in the 90s. Leaving aside my disappointment that the blog had been hijacked for use as a marketing platform for Vertica, I was astounded that the article was a complete rehash of a keynote that Stonebraker had delivered at The Ingres Conference back in 2004. Now I realize that great ideas and innovations don’t grow on trees, but I expected the inaugural blog to provide either some insights into database history that had never been shared previously, or to outline some revolutionary *new* idea. Column based storage is interesting, and will definitely be beneficial in certain BI deployments, but I don’t believe it will sound the death knell for the use of row based storage in BI deployments. What do you think?

I notice that the second blog posting on The Database Column also relates to column databases, so perhaps the blog should be renamed “The Column Database Column”.

 

  Posted in Innovation

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.