Clearly spurred on by IBM’s current distributed – processing – of the – future enthusiasm – you hadn’t noticed? It’s in all the company’s literature extolling the virtues of future products relational database developer Oracle Corp found it politic to indulge in a little crystal ball gazing exercise of its own the other day. Broadly […]
Clearly spurred on by IBM’s current distributed – processing – of the – future enthusiasm – you hadn’t noticed? It’s in all the company’s literature extolling the virtues of future products relational database developer Oracle Corp found it politic to indulge in a little crystal ball gazing exercise of its own the other day. Broadly speaking, and according to Oracle’s John Radcliffe, the future is Relational – a trend that would seem to be reinforced by IBM’s recent decision to phase out the heirarchical IMS product – with the fastest growing market sector firmly tipped to be on-line transaction processing (what is off line transaction processing?). Although honest enough to confess that a lot more work, particularly on the transparency front, still had to be done, Radcliffe also hammered home the distributed database message. Charting the current rate of progress, he claimed that present database offerings – including the latest version of Oracle’s eponymous own – could now provide users with an initial distributed query capability. The second release of IBM’s DB2 Version 2 was pinpointed as a second milestone, with the undoubted provision of an updating facility designed to span a network. With its own release 7.0 however, Oracle would, he indicated, move one stage further still, by providing a transparent Read-Write capability across the network – a process which, to date, still requires a great deal of transaction control at the application level. Other, more theoretical areas and trends explored by Radcliffe included the building of so-called extensible databases, achieved through the extension of SQL to enable end-users to define their own functions, and the rise of the database engine through the increasing tendency to separate front- and back-end technologies. Big challenges yet to be fully addressed were the exploitation of raw hardware power – Transputers, parallel architectures et al and the development of secure databases for Ministry of Defence and military-type users, he concluded.
