O'Reilly Network: OScon replete with database topics [July 22, 2002] "Relational databases are still the stars of the data storage firmament. After them, the next most popular type of databases are the even older DBM key/value type. These old stand-bys have been challenged by companies pushing object-oriented databases, and recently XML databases have emerged with claims on the future. ... Why haven't the challengers won out? Perhaps it's because object-oriented and XML solutions demand that the organization data be limited for the convenience of the programming language. Organizations that invest huge sums into collecting data want all the richness and sophistication they can get in searching that data, and the best we have at this point is still the relational database. So we're going to have to deal for some time to come with painful clashes between the relational model and the model offered by whatever language we choose to work in."