No doubt if you've careered in developing MRP/ERP apps. You've spent huge time trying not to change the data model, orchestrating development processes, and developing new features for customers only to find they won't upgrade because a data conversion is too disruptive.
Nowadays start-ups are using meta-data driven frameworks or MVC model driven entity frameworks to speedup the application development process. But have meta data driven apps become convoluted with data storage?
In the 1960's computers needed to be told what the schema was before data could be stored, there was insufficient processing power to examine the data for schema in real-time. Thus a 50 year period of high-schema business systems started. RDBMS and SQL standardized the data storage.
Business system customers and IT expect SQL storage today, but others like Google have innovated and moved data storeage forward to other practises. Proof is evidenced by all the action in the social internet space, informatics for life-sciences, distributed energy management.
A couple of interesting companies offering new ways of working. AsterData combines SQL with the first-ever In-Database MapReduce programming framework for high-performance mission-critical data warehousing. Cloudera provides the open source Hadoop framework, the basis for data management at many large consumer Internet companies.
Tossing around low schema business systems with peers, I'm generally told forgetaboutit; Transaction systems need highly schemad data to guarantee data consistency. But soonest a majority of business data storage will not be transactional, data will be text, pictures, video, audio, feeds. Meanwhile we keep using predictable schema to store unpredictable data. Gordan Bell and Jim Gemmell cover the shift to huge data in TotalRecall and project video will occupy about 50 percent of data storage.
For different ways of working with data. Marissa Meyer spoke at PARC on Innovation at Google: The physics of data. Brett Taylor on the How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data.
Marrisa Meyer @ PARC: Innovation at Google: The Physics of Data
Brett Tayor @ CBS: How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
Is it time to dream differently about data storage for business?
