Enterprise data set to explode in 2006 |
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By Lauren Walker, News Writer
28 Nov 2005 | SearchWinIT.com |
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While 2006 isn't the year for major product releases from the big database vendors, DBAs will be busy managing growing volumes of data, integrating data across heterogeneous platforms and watching as open source software proliferates in the enterprise.
Existing federal regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, require companies to retain many more documents than before and to keep that information secure and retrievable. That means the volume of data will keep expanding.
The fastest-growing segment in a database is "unstructured data" such as e-mail messages, forms and images that are not broken down in traditional relational databases -- and XML data -- say analysts.
"Databases have done a very good job of storing structured data -- but with unstructured data they have not," said Noel Yuhanna, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., in Cambridge, Mass.
Reaching into that unstructured data to extract information is one pressing integration issue. The other is interoperability -- being able to get information using data from different applications, which may run on different operating systems.
With IBM's DB2 Viper, Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 and Oracle's XML DB feature in 9i and 10g, all three major database vendors are now offering XML capability, which allows a database to query the content of files that are not in relational database form. Bernie Spang, director of databases at IBM, estimated that 35% of business information is already in XML, compared with only 15% in traditional relational databases.
IBM is addressing the explosion of XML data by adding features for managing, sharing and securing XML data in the DB2 Viper release, Spang said.
Other technology that will see continued growth is the use of open source software in large enterprises.
Mounting pressure to keep costs in line means IT departments will face managing ever-expanding stores of data with limited new resources. Open source software may seem like an economical alternative. "Open source is a topic of interest due to the potential cost savings," said David Greene, information technology manager at South Bay Workforce Investment Board in Hawthorne, Calif.
Previously, open source has not been appropriate for the most important applications in a corporation, Forrester's Yuhanna said. As the technology matures, however, more customers are electing to try it.
Yuhanna said that one sign of that maturity is the existence of tools, applications and hardware vendors that support open source database software.
"It's taken time to get here," he said, "but in 2006, you'll really see it come into its own."
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