A long time ago, when I was still in college back in the late 80's, early 90's, I firmly believed that the relational database would lost their market share in the year 2000, and the object persistence models (like db4o) and the rest of the object oriented databases family would naturally take their place.
I was obviously wrong. No mater how much we know about the ORM dificulties, we are still using the relational paradigm. And quit rightly, because it as been proven to work. And maybe because we are used to those...
I also failed in the following predictions for the end of the century:
- "in the early 90s, I predicted the fax would not make it to the 2oth century";
- "in the early 90s, I predicted voice would be only transported over data channels until the end of the century".
2 comments:
A common reaction to failed predictions is to flip around 180 degrees and consequently believe, that the opposite will happen just because the first attempt has failed.
A typical example of this pendulum thinking is "e-commerce" which did not create a New Economy as expected in 2000 but DID change the world -- just a little later and a little different than anybody expected.
For that matter, db4o is a good example how wrong your reversed prediction ("relational forever") could be as well:
db4o was NOT around before 2000, but is in fact a new project started after the turn of the century and got a huge momentum over the last two years.
The db4o project does 3 things different from the 1st gen ODBMS (like ObjectStore and Versant):
- focus on embedded use, as integral part of an application or a software-enabled device (no DBA, no competition to Oracle & co, it's a complement to RDBMS than a replacement)
- open source development and distribution model to create what has quickly become the world's largest user base of ODBMS with some 20,000 registered users (and users DO matter if you establish a new technology)
- native to the emerging OOP standards Java AND .NET (which were not so widely used in the 90s)
Consequently, companies like Boeing (in aricrafts), Ricoh (in photocopiers) and Seagate (in consumer electronics appliances) have selected db4o for their products and we're bullish that there's quite a huge market for object persistence where ORMs simply won't do the job, e.g. on your handheld.
Cheers,
Christof
Tanx for your comment.
Don't get me wrong, I still believe this is the path to go, I'm just acknowledging my failure to predict when this change would take place.
More, in my opinion the change won't stop on db4o's paradigm: most of our information systems in the (near?) future will be implemented by the business users, not by developers. Probably some geeky business users, but definitly not developers.
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