Anyone remember the Network Databases of mainframe systems, before the days of Relational Algebra and Relational Databases?
People sighed with relief when Relational Algebra gave us elegant ways of organizing and querying databases during the late 70s and early 80's. Relational Databases flourished, Digital Equipment Corporation's RDB relational database was quickly bought by Oracle and replaced them globally and grew in non DEC customers also. Ingres, Sybase, Oracle, Informix all grew quickly!
Then Object Oriented Database science was evolving and just stopped with some applications with the Year 2000 hoopla, and then the Dot com boom. Advances in Database technology ground to a halt and now we are sort of stuck with Relational Databases for everything!
Anybody who has put data warehouses together and particularly highly interactive, Business Intelligence applications with Multidimensional Cubes, slicing and dicing, knows very well, the clumsiness with which everything is forced to the Relational and SQL way of doing things and that is turning out to be somewhat clumsy, unnatural and IT skills intensive.
Users of BI have started complaining about how inflexible the current Business Intelligence tools are in making things easier for the end user. If the initial architecture of your Data Warehousing is not made cleverly, adding additional things as time goes by, becomes clumsy and difficult.
It is ironic that we escaped Network databases of mainframe systems from the 70s to be only caught in the Relational databse jail! The pity is that there no good alternatives in the horizon!
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom - Anatole France












Leave a comment