Beyond Relational

Unlike other industries the IT industry changes at a fast past. The typically life span of enterpirse level technology (consumer technologies change much faster) is 25 years. Take a look at network and Novell; they lasted about 25 years. Take a look at 'green screen' data entry. This last about 25 years until client/server and then web based applications came along. Speaking of client/server and the pace of change. Client/server really only lasted about 10 years before web n-tier based development became the de-facto standard. So what about databases. The relational model has existed for about 15 years (in systems of any significant enterprise caliber). What is going to happen with database storage. Well, like mainframe legacy data stores such as VSAM, Datacom, IDMS, IMS, Adabas etc. they have a very long life span. This is because data is at the heart of the enterprise. You can easily swap out user interface, and in some cases change the network protocol you use. Even though data stores don't change that often and there migration is disruptive to not only your applications, customers and systems but to the entire business, I am seeing a movement to other data storage model more in line with the internet spend of doing business, temporary nature of data and the distributed world to information retrieval and processing. The parameters of this change will involve a data storage model which is:

1. A distributed GRID

2. Data location is transparent to the application

3. Data and code being tightly coopled but dynamically partitioned on the GRID