amazon db

Always interesting Apokalyptik writes in the progressive-trivialization-of-databases department:

Well not long ago the people at Amazon rethought process communication, and rethought storage, and then rethought servers. Perhaps its about time they rethought the database as well.  I have a hunch (as others have noted here before) that they already are!

I really think that a lot, and I mean a LOT, could be done with a very simple model.

1. Tables are their own island (no foreign keys)
2. simple auto Incrementing PK’s
3. every column indexed
4. only simple operators supported ( =, >, < , !=, is null, is not null )

Heresy! Ack! Foo! Bar! NO! THATS NOT A REAL DATABASE.  Well, no, not as you mean by “real database” but it certainly is a database.  And I expect it would be good enough for 85% of peoples wants, needs, and desires.

Make the columns sparse and the column values lists, and I'm completely happy. (Sparsity for ad-hoc extensibility, lists for modelling "documents".)