7 Sep 2007, 10:31 p.m.

Are Relational Databases Obsolete?

None

I found this hilarious.

Michael Stonebraker, co-creator of the Ingres and Postgres database management systems, recently made a blog posting suggesting that column-oriented database engines (example: Vertica) might someday triumph over the traditional row-oriented engines (example: every other database engine you know) in some situations, perhaps most notably the data-warehousing field. It's an interesting post, and well worth reading.

Somebody else thought so. Computer World reported the story under the title:

Relational database pioneer says technology is obsolete.

Slightly sensationalist, but whatever. And so naturally the story turned up on Slashdot as:

Are Relational Databases Obsolete?

Did anybody read TFA? I doubt it.

The real shame is that, I suspect this is how most 'real' journalism happens too.

Posted by Simon at 01:53:00 PM
17 Nov 2009, 11 a.m.

Simon Rose

In my opinion column based databases are an excellent complement to traditional relational databases - We use Sybase IQ for its excellent performance and compression - but had the product been available at the time, we might have considered the infobright engine for MySQL - as thats a columnated db engine too.