CRN | Breaking News | IBM Technologist Sees Expanded Role For Databases

CRN | Breaking News | IBM Technologist Sees Expanded Role For Databases "Selinger: I spent the first 27 of my 29 years in database looking at data that's very structured, with a definition of databases that were tied to things like warehouse inventory, banking and other kinds of very structured, classic kind of databases, which was then extended to some extent with the object relational model. But another 85 percent of the data in the world is stored in other formats. My job as a database expert is really to extend the power of searching provided by this high level specification to all of the things that need to be done to all of the data that you have, whether it's in Word documents or spreadsheets or presentations or e-mail. That's really where the understanding and the ability to deal with XML will come in. I see us extending that database to store other kind of data, to be able to do archiving of an e-mail, for example, and to have that managed by a database engine and to be able to search it using database searching techniques so you can find all the e-mails sent to a certain person or you can find all the e-mails referencing a certain stock transaction. This is something you need to do for managing your business, something you need to do for understanding your customers and something you may need to do for regulatory compliance.
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Selinger: What I would like to see is the ability for a large number of people who today are using file systems in their applications, particularly in the small and medium business area, to recognize the value that a database brings to them and be able to easily use one with no more trouble and no more fuss than using file systems today. The database has to be very easy to program to, it has to manage itself, it has to do things like automated backups, it has to add value beyond a file system with automatic recovery so if there is a corruption on the disk, for example, you could recover your data. Companies today, particularly the small to medium ISVs that write to file systems, will be able to access the database system just as easily and have all this benefit of this automation and not require a database administrator for all of those applications until the day they get big enough and heavy enough and mission critical enough to require an IT staff."

It's only a matter of time; DBMSs rule...