Are Relational Databases Obsolete?

Posted in Databases on Friday, the 7th of September, 2007.

I found this hilarious.

Michael Stonebraker, co-creator of the Ingres and Postgres database management systems, recently made a blog posting suggesting that column-oriented database engines (example: Vertica) might someday triumph over the traditional row-oriented engines (example: every other database engine you know) in some situations, perhaps most notably the data-warehousing field. It's an interesting post, and well worth reading.

Somebody else thought so. Computer World reported the story under the title:

Relational database pioneer says technology is obsolete.

Slightly sensationalist, but whatever. And so naturally the story turned up on Slashdot as:

Are Relational Databases Obsolete?

Did anybody read TFA? I doubt it.

The real shame is that, I suspect this is how most 'real' journalism happens too.

Comments

Posted by Simon Rose on Tuesday, the 17th of November, 2009.

In my opinion column based databases are an excellent complement to traditional relational databases - We use Sybase IQ for its excellent performance and compression - but had the product been available at the time, we might have considered the infobright engine for MySQL - as thats a columnated db engine too.

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