Getting Agile

I have been rambling to colleagues about how much I despise relational databases for many reasons. These include the hierarchical formation of data, the finite set of relationships between tables, their inability to distribute themselves, and the maintenance overhead that they create for application and integration development projects.

One approach that I thought was a very viable alternative to the relational database is a grid of services with the ability to persist only those data elements which are worth the effort. I would contend that a large amount of current data sets do not need to be persisted into a relational database and are either temporary or reference data. Persisting this type of data becomes a hindrance to maintenance objectives as a database grows over time and possibly, or even probably, after an initial release.

I happened to have a magazine laying around that I got at the Java One Conference this year. It was the Dr. Dobbs Journal which had an article called High-Performance Data Management with Java inside. This was quite a coincidence since I had just come back from a lunch conversation with some colleagues where I was trying to communicate my distaste for relational databases and the use of grids for data access as an alternative. I thought that the article was a great overview of this approach to data management. The sub title for the article I thought described the high level parts quite well:

On-disk persistent storage, in-memory data storage, & cache management

If you get a chance, please take a look at the article. I hope to see a revolution in the data persistence layer of our future applications which will remove some shortcomings of the current relational hell.