Flying under the radar
In a SQL world, post-relational databases are holding their own
By Charles Barouch as IBM to lesser-known at the conference, here’s volume of data retrieval.
IN NE WPORT BEACH, CALIF. companies such as Inter- t h e s u m m a r y o f t h e That means fe wer read
In the modern it Systems, Northgate and partisan case for why a cycles and therefore lon-world, SQL and XML jBase. At the International business might consider ger M TBF (mean time
have become such Spectrum Conference here post-relational databases between failures) relative
key components in the in late March, seven of the in addition to—or instead to the volume of business.
database sector that it’s dif- major database vendors in of—RDBMS (relational It also means that a pro-ficult to remember a time this arena presented their database management grammer or analyst can
when they weren’t part of wares, touted new partner- system) technology: see the primary relation-the architectural story. ships and detailed plans ships by looking directly However, in the late for expansion. Scale at the data, without actu-
1960s and early ’70s, A quick look through SQL scales exception- ally needing to see the
database architectures the conference agenda ally well when scale means schema.
with flexible field sizes, reveals the same topics increasing the number IBM has documented
nested tables and loose- that can be seen at a of users without loss of excellent throughput with
data typing options were thousands of active users,
winning m arket share so even user scaling works
and mind share. While well in these environ-these earlier systems ments.
lacked the tagging that in
many ways defines XML Total cost of
as XML, they behaved ownership
in a remarkably simi- Many post-relational
lar manner in all other database environments in
respects. small and midsize busi-B e c a u s e t h e s e s y s - nesses have a staff of one
t e m s — t h e c u r r e n t Attendees view IBM’s display at the International Spectrum Conference. programmer. They tend
terms to describe them to have one or two con-are “post-relational” or relational database con- speed. Post-relational sys- sultants who work less
“multivalue”—don’t get ference: how to develop tems scale exceptionally than 40 hours a month
a lot of press coverage, robust Web-to-data inte- well when scale means for them. For bigger com-it is easy to write them gration, change control increasing the complexity panies, the staffing range
off as one of the many management, security, of the application. usually caps out at one-noble experiments that document management The secret is in the third of the staff required
have fallen by the way- and all the other usual datastructure. Due tothe for RDBMS, even when
side. The IT industry subjects. XML-style nesting, data actively re-engineering.
is littered with better In addition, just like integrity is inherent in Applications in the
mousetraps that even- their better-known coun- the model. This requires post-relational market are
tually disappear. terparts in the SQL world, fe we r c om pu tati onal generally less expensive
However, post-relational these databases have resources to check and for equivalent functions.
technologieshaven’tfallen. stronglypartisansup- protectthecompleteness That, combined with
There are many compa- porters. of the data. Additionally, smaller staff require-nies that still offer such In reviewing the infor- nesting allows for dra- ments to manage and
database products, from mation at the event and matically fewer reads to update the applications
such tech-sector mainstays talking with participants achieve the equivalent once they are purchased,
