{"id":12056,"date":"2009-07-07T14:15:19","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T13:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=1071"},"modified":"2021-08-19T11:20:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-19T09:20:30","slug":"the-end-of-relational-databases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/the-end-of-relational-databases.html","title":{"rendered":"The End of Relational Databases?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hasso-banner\"<\/p>\n

Hasso Plattner<\/a>, SAP\u2019s co-founder, chairman, and \u201cChief Software Advisor\u201d has been giving a series of talks<\/a> including his keynote at SAPPHIRE 2009<\/a> on why in his view \u201cdisk has become yesterday\u2019s tape\u201d, and why column storage<\/a> and in-memory techniques are the future for both data warehousing AND enterprise applications, displacing the 20-year reign of relational databases.<\/p>\n

\"image\"Experts have advocated column databases such as Sybase IQ<\/a> and LucidDB<\/a> for data warehousing for many years.<\/p>\n

But now, based on research done at the his Institute<\/a> (and a lifetime of trying to get the best performance possible for enterprise applications), Plattner is advocating basing both<\/em> OLAP<\/a> and<\/em> OLTP<\/a> systems on column storage in order to eliminate the need for the cumbersome ETL process, and reduce system complexity and the number of database tables.<\/p>\n

More details are available in his white paper A Common Database Approach for OLAP and OLTP Using an In-Memory Column Database<\/a> and a related presentation<\/a>. The research was conducted using SAP\u2019s TREX<\/a> technology and real customer data (to see what the technology can do in a business intelligence context, check out SAP BusinessObjects Explorer<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Given that the vast majority of relational databases are used for OLTP transactions today, this would represent a radical change for the enterprise application market.<\/p>\n

And although data warehousing will still need to exist, because of master-data management, data synchronization, data quality, etc., it would certainly be a lot simpler, and a lot faster, since much of it could be done directly on the \u201ctransactional\u201d data source.<\/p>\n

While nobody has promised that SAP will develop the concept as a product, Plattner has presented his views widely to SAP employees, and leaves no doubt that he thinks this is the way ahead.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the last slide of Hasso\u2019s presentation at the recent SIGMOD 2009<\/a> conference for database researchers \u2013 this is\u00a0 certainly something that we\u2019ve been looking forward to for a while\u2026<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SAP’s co-founder believes that “disk has become yesterday’s tape” and that the era of relational databases is over, to be replaced by column storage for both data warehousing AND enterprise applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[204,213,352,476,566,778,781,911],"class_list":["post-12056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bi-20","tag-business-intelligence","tag-businessobjects","tag-database","tag-explorer","tag-hasso-plattner","tag-olap","tag-oltp","tag-sap"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/hassobanner-1.jpg?fit=690%2C310&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-38s","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20716,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12056\/revisions\/20716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}