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.
- Tables are their own island (no foreign keys)
- simple auto Incrementing PK’s
- every column indexed
- 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".)
Comments