RENATA: Red Nacional Académica de Tecnología Avanzada. Colombia

Following the 'red brick road' to data management

For the last 40 years, the way that large-scale services, such as global banks, and scientific experiments, like the LHC at CERN, have been managing their data has been reminiscent of Lyman Frank Baum’s  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

In the fairytale, Dorothy asks how to get to the Emerald City to see the Wizard of Oz, and is simply told that, “all you do is follow the Yellow Brick Road.” Any time she strays from the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy and her friends encounter serious danger and eventually return to follow the safer road.

Relational databases are the Yellow Brick Road of managing large structured data globally. They are the most popular form of database scheme and have been commonly used since the 1970s. While other types of databases have been built, none have been as effective.

In relational databases, data is organized in the form of related tables: each table can have many records, and these records can have many data fields. This data can be accessed and added without having to reorganize the tables. The software interface used to build and access data structures within relational databases is Structured Query Language (SQL). It’s the most widely known and respected query language used today and the closest thing to a standard in the database world.

Up until now, for organizations, this has been a happy marriage of data storage and access. But, there are growing doubts that relational databases can handle the ‘data deluge’ experienced by the likes of growing web companies and the transition into eScience.

In the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, a red brick road is intertwined with the yellow one. Similarly, a new type of database might soon offer a different path: NoSQL, or Not-Only-SQL, first coined in 2008, is promising a faster and more scalable database architecture, at least for some cases. It comes in many different implementations, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, and CouchDB to name just a few. Plus, NoSQL query languages are being developed that are easier to learn than SQL.

Big science and web giants such as Google are looking at NoSQL as the next step in the evolution of database models. Its arrival could shake up the market and replace existing technology within a year – or its arrival might be entirely for nothing. “No one knows yet if it will be a disruptive technology for us,” said Tony Cass, leader of the database services group at CERN.

Fuente: http://www.isgtw.org