Random thoughts on wider ideas for the DBA

1)     The database server market offers an increasing amount of different options. Some examples

a)     NOSQL for key-value stores, document databases, column stores, and graph databases . Example : Obamacare

b)    PostgreSQL offers a cheap option for developers

c)     Cloud based database servers .Example: Microsoft Azure platform .   Although the success of virtualization at an Enterprise level will stem the flow of  migration to the Cloud.   Migrating to the Cloud requires coding changes and this adds risk and cost which many IT budgets cannot absorb

2)     RDBMS remains the core.  An RDBMS from a large vendor comes with all sorts of other applications beyond the Database engine, such as Scheduling Agents and Reporting Servers. As a result , the RDBMS usage and application is involved in every aspect of the organisation.  But other offers will shrink RDBMS usage

 3)     NOSQL would be useful with ACID (Atomicity,Consistency,Isolation,Durability)  for the application developer.  An interesting development – Google and Spanner. Read the full paper http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html.  The relevant quote which outlines the reasoning behind the need for ACID:

“We believe it is better to have application programmers deal with performance problems due to overuse of transactions as bottlenecks arise, rather than always coding around the lack of transactions.”

4)     Oracle,SQL Server and MYSQL remain the most popular. DB2 is widespread

2014

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