Thursday, September 6, 2007

Data management

There is more to data management than relational databases. What most enterprises lack are high level views that describe the data and how it relates to other aspects of the enterprise.

These conceptual views are implementation independent i.e. independent of the style of technology. These views should relate to logical views (which have an element of implementation specificity to them) and to other conceptual perspectives e.g. rules, functions, services etc. The logical would relate into turn to physical models and implementations. It the combination of this information allows useful business questions to answered.

Styles of implementation technology
RDBMses "long in the tooth" (to quote Stonebraker) and he suggests columnar databases the way of the future.

The focus on row based storage reflects a transactional orientation - rather than a knowledge or collaboration based orientation.

Apart from the issue of where to store data in rows or columns there is also data that is not suited to either: XML and other documents, images, locations, objects etc.

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