We’re heading towards very exciting times in the field of databases!
At Topconf in beautiful Tallin, Estonia, Nikita Ivanov (founder and CEO of GridGain Systems) was talking about how the ever crumbling price of DRAM gets in-memory computing and thus in-memory databases within the reach of being affordable by even small and medium enterprises. Nikita claims that 99% of all companies have less than 10TB of transactional data. While this has been completely impossible ten years ago, nowadays, you can store that much data in memory for less than 15000 USD! Compared to the Oracle license that you might buy with the server, that’s almost nothing. Imagine that you can scale up several orders of magnitude without changing your “legacy” architecture. Without switching to something like NoSQL.
A day before, Christoph Engelbert presented Hazelcast, a competitor product of GridGain Systems. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend his talk but I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with Christoph on the flight back home. He’s a very interesting and fun guy to talk to and gave me quite some insight about what his company is evangelising in the context of “Big Data”. Essentially, modern data processing involves moving computation towards data, instead of moving data towards computation. While Hazelcast solves this through their own storage mechanisms, this paradigm has been equally true for “legacy” OLAP systems based on relational databases. Using PL/SQL, or T-SQL, or any other procedural language, you can execute complex algorithms right where the data is: In your database.
For those of you frequently following my blog, you will not be surprised that I am very thrilled about the above evolutions in data computing. The ever increasing consternation with ORMs and the big amount of confusion about the future of “NoSQL” have lead to a recent revival of SQL as a language.
Back to the roots.
This seems to have culminated at the recent O’Reilly Strata Conference, where Mark Madsen, a popular researcher and analyst was walking around with a geeky T-Shirt showing the History of NoSQL. I’ve had a brief chat with him on Twitter. He might be selling this T-Shirt, if it goes viral.
