Death of the Database? .. from IT/XPO
A better, although not perhaps not as big of draw of a session name, would have been "Evolution of Persistence". The speaker's point was that the role of a the database will change in the evolving tech landscape where data is everywhere in the network, real time, and doesn't need to be persisted into a database.
For example, why do you need an inventory database, if your system can get all the info needed from the RFID tags on your widgets in your warehouse? If the data you need only has to live for a transient time, ie. for the duration of a transaction, why persist it?
I found his assertions thought-provoking, but it raised more questions that it answered. Think of the security issues, will your financial institution really allow your application access to a transaction while it executes, so you can confirm that the order has been paid for? Can we really get away with not storing the state of an order in an eCommerce scenario? What happens if the service goes down and we lose the state and it isn't persisted? You get the picture.
As far as the question, will DBAs have a job in the future? He advised DBAs to start learning about middleware since the persistence will move up the stack in the form of queues, actual objects (ie. RFID tags), and in the services themselves. Your mileage on this advice may vary.
While this does gel with the philosophy of 'Live in the present', the world does not work that way unfortunately. If it reached that state of utopia, then one wouldnt need s/w, let alone DBs. On the contrary, RFID will lead to an information overload which will require heavy filtering and some of that data will obviously be transient. I think one will always need to maintain a record - real-time simply enables/improves some functions that currently rely on old(er) data and allow for better decision making; it will not lead to the death of persisted data. If the speaker went through the EPCIS work he would realise that RFID relies on persisting the data pertaining to tag events.
Posted by 204.153.12.53 on October 19, 2005 at 04:45 PM PDT #
Posted by Kathy on October 26, 2005 at 11:45 AM PDT #