Developing an understanding of the theory of innovation

Thursday, February 08, 2007

A couple of posts about Database disruption

Zack has some good articles about disruptive software and a specific article about databases.

Interesting reading the comments regarding CAD and Google amongst others. I just haven't made the time to post lately here.

As mentioned in Christensen's book, the money tends to move from integrators to component makers and then back. I get the impression that Oracle is going for the integrator role on the whole enterprise software stack.
Will this work?
How much do managers want to be locked it a single vendor?
Or it is actually to the point again where the whole enterprise software stack has fragmented (brought on in part by Open Source) and business is starting to get worried about reliability and compatibility again?
The whole SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) is trying the stave off this worry. I am inclined to think more businesses will buy into the sales pitch that once Oracle has all components they will be able to integrate them better.

I don't think MySQL should become another Oracle database. Their move to allow new storage engines is going to spawn a data storage revolution ... seriously. There are some very interesting storage models which are more optimized for the increasing needs of web backends and real-time data.
Jim Gray's site (he is missing after going to sea in a boat) is a brain stormer.

So MySQL may just end up moving into a new potentially profitable space which has fragmented niche players away from pure relational databases. So MySQL ends up the tool floating on a sea of new storage engines, like google on top of websites.

Last question: What happens if the database just disappears under the hood. You have a built for your application storage engine with the ease to export/import/perform relational queries.
There is no lost of data movement to and from your database, no closed data architecture, just a storage engine completely optimized for your application.

Have Fun

Paul