Database 2.0

For a long time (decades I believe) it seemed like the General purpose Database was the silver bullet. Object Oriented Databases tried to take the shine away from RDBMS , but only to strengthen the notion that RDBM’S do best at what they are supposed to do – Store , Query and Update Data.

The application development world adjusted to the notion that the Object Relational mismatch is a reality and instead of fighting it let us work with the RDBMS systems and make world a better place. Tools like Hibernate had great success because they accepted the strengths of RDBMS as compared to competing technologies at that time like EJB's . The Enterprise was also caught up in the ERP wave where everything in the Enterprise needed to have a predefined structure, vocabulary established etc.

2007 brought some interesting changes in the DB world. Web 2.0 brought the concepts of self organization , realization that all information does not reside in-house , that everything cannot be structured , that Information Management is not just EDW / BI - there is a whole world out there with unstructured information and Semantic Web . Consequently SQL and RDBMS is not the silver bullet.

2007 also brought some interesting DB’s to the forefront including SimpleDB , BigTable , HP Neoview , CouchDB each of these serving very different purposes finetuned for particular needs.

So the definition of Database 2.o in my opinion is that it is the realization that all information in the Enterprise cannot be out into RDBMS , cannot be structured and that there can and will be multiple datasources to information within and Enterprise.

So what is my point ?

I think the Database market is splitting into two layers
1. The general purpose database market - now turning out to be a commodity market
2. The specialized DB market

So finally I would like to close on the trigger that got me to think the above - The mysql acquisition by sun – Why does sun need a database product NOW ? it has severe wall street issues and convincing the market of buyout of a company that gives away free products is going to amazingly difficult.

Here is the answer I came up with .
With the technology and engineering capability needed to build a general purpose database generally available – Building a high performance RDBMS system that competes with the likes of Oracle and DB2 does not seem like a very big challenge. So if competing on price and brand are your differentiator's in the general purpose DB market then what better way to compete by giving the product free.

Now monetization on mysql and revenue potential is a separate discussion. My discussion above is keeping the number of deployments in mind.

more reasons for the Sun / mqsql acquisition

Struts , JSF , spring mvc , GWT - what is it going to be

I was reading the blog at java based web frameworks for 2008 and ended up doing a query on indeed.com.

So I compared the following
1. Struts
2. JSF (Java server faces)
3. GWT (Googles web application toolkit)
4. Spring MVC

Here is what I found

And Now comparing the Relative growth

As I had expected Struts is the clear leader and my guess just like Mainframe's still are a very important part of the Enterprise , Struts will always be there in the web 1.0 world.

JSF - to me is really a web1.0 technology -just an upgrade to struts.Sun has a knack of making things complicated and I dont think it has handled JSF any different than EJB's 1.0.

Spring MVC - has an interesting story, Spring Core(the middleware piece) has a very strong acceptance and spring core has a bigger audience than spring mvc. It's simplicity of programming model , well thought feature's make it a good candidate for use.

GWT in 2008 is IMO going to be the real winner. About an year ago I had posted that 2007 would be the year for GWT . Well looking at the numbers I think it was. It has not overtaken struts but the relative growth has been the highest - 30,000 % WOW!.

It has three things going for it
1. Java based (so the corporate java developers have an upgrade path)
2. It exposes a whole new capability of ground up AJAX applications not available in Struts , JSF or spring MVC
3. Simple (in every way - learning , developing , building , deploying)

I ran into a client recently who was using GWT very aggressively , Spring core and Spring MVC.When I asked him about why he was using Spring MVC and GWT- he commented the following

- Everything on website cannot be AJAX based application style. I will have some pages that really are suited for html (jsp) type content . I am using Spring MVC for that(example login page , help pages )
-Also Spring MVC is also a good place to put everything together. It works well with J2EE file structures etc and a great way to launch everything and coordinate the website.

The above view is what I think will shape 2008.