Friday, November 25, 2005
Learning from THE WEB
ACM Queue - Learning from THE WEB - The Web has taught us many lessons about distributed computing, but some of the most important ones have yet to fully take hold.
"...Hmm. There are some interesting implications in all of this.
One is that the Semantic Web is in for a lot of heartbreak. It has been trying for five years to convince the world to use it. It actually has a point. XML is supposed to be self-describing so that loosely coupled works. If you require a shared secret on both sides, then I’d argue the system isn’t loosely coupled, even if the only shared secret is a schema. What’s more, XML itself has three serious weaknesses in this regard:..."
"...What does this Mean for Databases?
All of this has profound implications for databases. Today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web. ..."
"... Distributed computing has been learning and evolving in response to the lessons of the Web. Formats and protocols are arising to overcome the limitations of XML—even as XML in turn arose to overcome the limitations of CORBA and DCOM. It is time that the database vendors stepped up to the plate and started to support a native RSS 2.0/Atom protocol and wire format; a simple way to ask very general queries; a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them; far more fluid schemas that don’t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places; and built-in linear scaling so that the database salespeople can tell their customers, in good conscience, for this class of queries you can scale arbitrarily with regard to throughput and extremely well even with regard to latency, as long as you limit yourself to the following types of queries. Then we will know that the database vendors have joined the 21st century...."
"...Hmm. There are some interesting implications in all of this.
One is that the Semantic Web is in for a lot of heartbreak. It has been trying for five years to convince the world to use it. It actually has a point. XML is supposed to be self-describing so that loosely coupled works. If you require a shared secret on both sides, then I’d argue the system isn’t loosely coupled, even if the only shared secret is a schema. What’s more, XML itself has three serious weaknesses in this regard:..."
"...What does this Mean for Databases?
All of this has profound implications for databases. Today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web. ..."
"... Distributed computing has been learning and evolving in response to the lessons of the Web. Formats and protocols are arising to overcome the limitations of XML—even as XML in turn arose to overcome the limitations of CORBA and DCOM. It is time that the database vendors stepped up to the plate and started to support a native RSS 2.0/Atom protocol and wire format; a simple way to ask very general queries; a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them; far more fluid schemas that don’t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places; and built-in linear scaling so that the database salespeople can tell their customers, in good conscience, for this class of queries you can scale arbitrarily with regard to throughput and extremely well even with regard to latency, as long as you limit yourself to the following types of queries. Then we will know that the database vendors have joined the 21st century...."
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