Friday, November 25, 2005
The two-way data web
The two-way data web | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-11-23 | By Jon Udell
"The idea, in a nutshell, is that the truly scalable databases of the future will be more like the Web than like Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles), DB2, or SQL Server.
In last month’s ACM Queue, Bosworth elaborated on some of the lessons the Web has taught us about simplicity, human accessibility, “sloppily extensible” formats, the social dimension of software, and loose coupling. But he also introduced a key technical point about RSS and Atom, the feed formats powering the blog revolution. These formats represent sets of items. Typically, the items contain Weblog postings, but they can also contain XML fragments that represent anything under the sun. What’s more, items can link to other items or collections. Bosworth argues that this architecture lends itself to aggressive scale-out, decentralized caching, and grassroots schema evolution, all of which tend to elude conventional databases.
There’s no free lunch, of course. When you query this RSS/Atom data web, you should expect more structural precision than full-text search affords, but you shouldn’t plan on fast execution of complex nested queries.
We’ve yet to colonize the middle ground between these extremes, and I don’t think anyone really knows what the sweet spot will turn out to be. I’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of XPath and XQuery, and my dream is that these XML-oriented query disciplines can be federated at large scale. But first things first: We need to create the data web. And recently, two leading figures have dropped major hints about how that’s going to happen."
"The idea, in a nutshell, is that the truly scalable databases of the future will be more like the Web than like Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles), DB2, or SQL Server.
In last month’s ACM Queue, Bosworth elaborated on some of the lessons the Web has taught us about simplicity, human accessibility, “sloppily extensible” formats, the social dimension of software, and loose coupling. But he also introduced a key technical point about RSS and Atom, the feed formats powering the blog revolution. These formats represent sets of items. Typically, the items contain Weblog postings, but they can also contain XML fragments that represent anything under the sun. What’s more, items can link to other items or collections. Bosworth argues that this architecture lends itself to aggressive scale-out, decentralized caching, and grassroots schema evolution, all of which tend to elude conventional databases.
There’s no free lunch, of course. When you query this RSS/Atom data web, you should expect more structural precision than full-text search affords, but you shouldn’t plan on fast execution of complex nested queries.
We’ve yet to colonize the middle ground between these extremes, and I don’t think anyone really knows what the sweet spot will turn out to be. I’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of XPath and XQuery, and my dream is that these XML-oriented query disciplines can be federated at large scale. But first things first: We need to create the data web. And recently, two leading figures have dropped major hints about how that’s going to happen."
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