, 2 min read
Relational databases: are they obsolete?
Michael Stonebraker is predicting that the dominance of the generic relational database is coming to an end. Having recently founded several database companies, he has a vested interested in this prediction .
Here is Stonebraker logic: we can outperform relational databases with specialized solutions. Therefore, users will migrate to specialized engines. In effect, specialized players such as Vertica will grab market shares from Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server.
Unfortunately, Stonebraker’s arguments are misleading. As far as performance is concerned, Stonebraker is obviously right: we are undergoing major changes. As pointed out by Daniel Tunkelang, you can store a lot of data in 32GB of RAM. Solid-state drives can be used to wipe out some IO bottlenecks. Yet, these technological changes will not change the game for two reasons:
- We have always been able to outperform generic relational databases: (1) column stores have been around since the seventies when they were called transposed files (2) search engines have always used their own indexes (3) lightweight key-value engines like Tokyo Cabinet have always been around. Generic relational databases did not achieve dominance due to their superior performance.
- Generic relational databases are frequently catching up to specialized engines. In particular, they are not limited to row stores. Curt Monash’s blog post on Oracle’s hybrid columnar approach makes this obvious. Nicolas Bruno, in Teaching an Old Elephant New Tricks, predicted that the lessons learned by start-ups such as Vertica will be integrated into traditional relational engines.
Further reading: I was motivated by the latest StorageMojo blog post. See also my blog posts Trading compression for speed with vectorization, Changing your perspective: horizontal, vertical and hybrid data models, Column stores and row stores: should you care? and Native XML databases: have they taken the world over yet?