Do we still need relational databases?

[#1]

Dears,

will this new in-memory technology reduce the need of a relational database?

There are also rumors about a column-based database... are we talking about the same product?

Thanks,

Federico Biavati

[esjewett]

Federico,

I think that BWA technology and similar relational database alternatives will reduce the extent to which we feel forced to use relational databases for workloads that relational databases are not well-suited for. OLAP is one example. Many types of analytics and caching are other examples. Hopefully in these areas we'll see less of the "Oracle is the answer, now what's the question?" syndrome.

With regard to the "column-based" aspect of the BWA product, yes, BWA is column-based underneath. Unfortunately SAP is having a tendency to group a bunch of basic architectural approaches that are different from a relational model under the term "in memory". Column-based data storage is one of these approaches and it has absolutely nothing to do with in-memory. Compression (and query execution directly against compressed data, which I'm not sure if BWA supports) is another approach, which again is only tangentially related to in-memory in that it helps to facilitate in-memory by reducing total data volume.

Ethan