One good thing about the holiday season: you get to clean up your desk and catch up on your reading. Which I did. And among the gems in my bookmarked reading list was a recap of Gartner's "Death of the Database" presentation from last year's Gartner Symposium ITxpo.
There were lots of intriguing items in Gartner's presentation, but two jumped out at me.
First, Gartner sees data distribution increasing. It's only inevitable. They use the example of data on RFID tags. Does it make sense to continually read and store the information on tags as they move though a distribution chain, or would it make more sense to have a service that can read that data on an as-needed basis? Obviously, the latter.
This is what Gartner has been calling the "Data Services Layer." It's an abstraction at a higher level, above the databases, repositories, caches, and small data stores (like RFID tags), that knows where and how to get the data, and adds an appropriate level of security controls and auditability to make a CIO smile. And though Gartner only uses the term EII parenthetically in their research, an EII server that can federate and control information access across distributed and disparate data sources is exactly what Gartner is describing.
The second thing that jumped out at me was this: Gartner sees SQL taking a back seat to XQuery. Wow, I never thought I'd hear Gartner say that. That's something only XQuery evangelists would likely say. That doesn't mean SQL is going away anytime soon. Just that all the XML in the world (RFID info, Web Services, Blogs and RSS) is going to need some way to be queried.
Looks like 2006 is shaping up as a pretty interesting year for a company that can federate and control access across relational and XML sources, creating an instant data services layer.
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