GIVEN THE MATURE state of the modern RDBMS (relational database management system), it's difficult to imagine a splashy
breakthrough that could revolutionize the market in any given year. Nevertheless, many leading RDBMS vendors, including IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase, still found room for improvement in 2001. IBM's DB2 and Oracle's 9i in particular wowed us
in 2001.
Most of last year's major advances came in the area of interoperability with emerging technologies such as Web services
and XML strengthening RDBMS support for analytical applications and increasing performance and scalability. For example, Microsoft,
Oracle, and Sybase caught up with IBM in XML structure support, whereas IBM tried to break away from the pack by adding support
for InfiniBand and consolidating DB2's data and OLAP (online analytical processing) capabilities.
In general, the improvements we saw in 2001 gave companies faster performance, simplified management, and a common data
structure to support transactional and highly interactive applications. But because Web services remain a work in progress,
a good deal of the emerging RDBMS technology is still up in the air.
For example, although hierarchical and object-oriented databases no longer pose a serious threat to RDBMSes, the jury is
still out on whether or not Web services will spur RDBMS vendors to adopt native XML databases. For companies that spread
business data over multiple databases and platforms, the tendency to deploy e-business applications highlights the need to
access those databases concurrently.
Solutions that consolidate multirelational data structures into a single XML view, such as Software AG's Tamino, could become
a tempting approach to simplify development and management issues. But IBM's Relational Connect solution for unified access
to different RDBMSes favors DB2 semantics while maintaining the pristine structure of the original database. As yet, no clear
winner has emerged.
Of course, other trends are easier to anticipate. For example, the upcoming SPC-1 (Storage Performance Council) benchmark
will likely spur vendors to optimize their products for specific data-storage architectures. And whereas the industry is likely
to see a good deal of consolidation (as evidenced by IBM's recent acquisition of Informix), surviving commercial databases
will probably keep competing on price, performance, and scalability to support an ever-increasing load of transactional and
analytical applications.
Through the years, enterprises have come to expect a lot from database systems. Vendors must offer increasingly faster access,
smooth adaptation to the latest technological twists, backward-compatibility, resilience, scalability, and flexibility. But
2001 was a banner year for RDBMSes, which made significant inroads to comply with the burgeoning Web services revolution.
And given the importance of databases on the modern data structure, the lock-step progress of Web services and relational
database technology isn't likely to change anytime soon.
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