Bookmark Item #1: https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/bookmarks/read/129204/problems-of-rdbms

Bookmark Item #2: https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/bookmarks/read/129325/nosql-or-rdbms-are-we-asking-the-right-questions

Week 8 report: https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/forum/topic/129347/week-8-research-report/

The purpose of this week is to explore the limits of RDBMS and the potential downfall of its application in the cloud environment. Prior to discovering the potential incompatibilities with RDBMS in a distributed environment such as internet cloud environment, I had thought RDBMS is the be all and end all solution to all general purpose data storage and management needs. RDBMS is very prevalence in enterprises (i.e. oracle 11g, SQL SERVER 2008 R2, DB2, etc.) and even mobile device (i.e. Sybase SQL Anywhere) that led me to presume the rational data model is the only way to model data. I do realize that there are other specialized database models but it wasn’t until this week that I came across NoSQL – it turns out it does not stand for “no sql” but it is “Not Only SQL” which is to say SQL alternatives.

The focus of this week is to see how RDBMS fits in the cloud computing paradigm. I had detailed these issues in my report but I would like to add that many top tier RDBMS such as Oracle and Microsoft do provide “workaround” for those problems. For example, partitioning and sharding options is available in SQL Server 2008 R2 (http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/02/SQL-Sharding) to compartmentalize data across multiple servers. Next week will look into more non rational data model and its management tools.

Dickson