Trends and Directions in Database Technology

Relational database technology has become a key element of most enterprise IT architectures over the course of the last 25 years. During that period of time, relational database products like DB2 have evolved significantly to address the changing technology and business needs of customers. This evolution has come in the form of dramatic improvements in performance, scalability, availability and system management.The evolution has also introduced major functional enhancements to the relational database products that represent significant departures from the original concepts described by Dr. Codd in his seminal research. For example, customer demand for object database features in the 1990′s caused relational products like DB2 to introduce stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers as a vehicle for customizing the behavior of the relational database engine. More recently, most of the major relational products have evolved to include native data stores and query language enhancements to handle XML.
 In the past few years, a number of new database technologies have been introduced: in-memory data stores, graph stores, column stores, name/value stores, etc. Some industry pundits have proclaimed that these technologies represent the end of the relational database era. In this session, we will discuss some of these new technology developments, and describe some of the work that is being done within IBM to continue the evolution of DB2 to address these new technology and business needs.