Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental service in the cloud and will subsume both traditional file storage and most of the relational DB market. The relational model is not a good fit for most web applications for several reasons. First, almost all of the development is taking place in some form of object oriented language and a lot of unnecessary overhead is incurred in OR-mapping layers. Second, the normalized data model that is required to reap many of the benefits of the relational approach generally does not scale. Third, existing DB software requires too much esoteric tuning. Fourth, full text indexing and search is a key requirement for many applications today but has been an afterthought or add-on for DB software.
