Michael Stonebraker’s opinions and claims are always refreshing to read. He’s done a lot for our industry and for how we do data processing. Some of his claims are certainly right as well. Here’s an interview with him, telling us about his 5 predictions on the future of databases.
Of course, him being a software vendor, many of his claims should be read with caution. Today, the most popular DBMS (relational or not) are still Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server. Even his “popular” PostgreSQL is still a niche player, let alone the almost forgotten Ingres and the never really popular Vertica columnar “NewSQL” database. Obviously, we’re not saying they’re bad databases, but they’re certainly not very popular. The same goes with SAP. Their Sybase databases have been surpassed by SQL Server both in quality and in popularity 10 years ago, when Microsoft forked the Sybase code into T-SQL. We hardly believe that Oracle and Sybase will have the “final fight” for RDBMS supremacy.
But again. That’s Mike Stonebraker, the salesman as in “The Traditional RDBMS Wisdom is All Wrong”