The Database Wars are Making a Resurgence

Think back to the 1990’s and you’ll probably think of great bands like Dave Mathews and U2. But if you were in the technology business, you might also recall the “database wars.” There were so many database options that knowing where to house your data, and how to access it, became quite an issue. As Y2K rolled around, however, the database vendors dwindled back down to a much more manageable number and some prognosticators suggested that only 4 or 5 databases would exist for years to come.

But as will all things in the technology space, there is never just 4 or 5 of anything.  Today I dare not call it a war, it’s more like all sensibility has broken down in a tribal warfare for increasing specialized portion of the market.   The number of data silos and data sources driven from traditional databases, to specialty databases like SybaseIQ, Netizza, Greenplum, Hadoop, etc, to no-SQL and in Memory databases.

But what does this mean to applications developers and enterprise architects. The days of integrating and accessing data stored in each of these siloes just got a whole lot harder.  Adding to the problem is that many of these systems are self contained and don’t allow direct access to the data even if the cloud application was build on a traditional database.

I had a chance to give these new database wars some thought and drafted an article on the topic for Big Data Republic. Click below to read it – and feel free to promote it using the @DataDirect_News handle.