The Future of SQL – 2013 and Beyond

If you follow IT news, you know that January is the time of predictions. Everyone has thoughts on what’s to come in the realms of Big Data, Cloud, SaaS, analytics – you name it! If it has implications in the business world, someone’s making a prediction about it.

I recently read one such piece from Information Management on 2013 predictions for NoSQL in which I thought the author shared some good thoughts that mirror what we are currently hearing from our network of 300+ OEMs.

Like those predictions, we're also seeing rapidly growing adoption of NoSQL platforms in the enterprise. This is evidenced by the demand from our OEMs for data connectivity solutions to technologies such as Hadoop HBase, MongoDB and Cassandra. It’s clear from these requests that NoSQL is penetrating corporate development and coming onto the radar of IT managers across the board.

As a result of this demand, we are seeing an increasing affinity for SQL-based connectivity solutions to NoSQL technologies. As NoSQL makes the move into the enterprise IT wheelhouse, it brings many optimized benefits to particular use cases, but the hard-core reality is that virtually the entire business intelligence, analytics, and data visualization ecosystem of products are SQL-based. Getting the data in these NoSQL-based solutions in front of the eyeballs of decision makers still demands SQL – either via direct interaction with a BI tool or via extract-transform-load products.

And, with apologies to Mark Twain, the prediction of the death of structured data has indeed been greatly exaggerated. After all, with $26B in spend on RDBMS products (IDC) there's got to be a lot of structured data out there! But with the growth of less formally structured data in the enterprise, the pairing of structured and semi-structured approaches offer some unique benefits. My favorite example of this trend is an innovative company called Hadapt, based in Cambridge, MA. They've developed the Hadapt Adaptive Analytical Platform, which marries the Hadoop file system for unstructured data with relational technology for structured data for an optimized, low-latency analytics experience, regardless of data type. And Hadapt also offers SQL-based connectivity to this hybrid solution!

So, in short, I think we can expect big things from NoSQL in 2013. I predict an increase in NoSQL popularity and adoption in the corporate world and a “truce” if you will between SQL and NoSQL/NewSQL. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the industry in the coming twelve months and beyond.