Cloud Databases

NPR on Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 29, 2008

You know it’s important when NPR covers it !! On the “All Things Consider” radio show, NPR took a look into cloud computing. I’m not sure if Computing In The…

Sun Federal Cloud Computing eBook

By G C Network | August 28, 2008

Sun Federal now has it’s ebook on cloud computing available for all. The website doesn’t really offer any new information, but it does highlight how Sun Federal is targeting the…

Amazon Elastic Block Store

By G C Network | August 27, 2008

Last week, with their announcement of Elastic Block Store, Amazon has made enterprise class storage in the cloud a reality. According to Dion Hinchcliffe of Ziff Davis,”Elastic Block Store finally…

HP CTO On the Future

By G C Network | August 26, 2008

In a recent Web Guild article, Shane Robinson, Chief Strategy & Technology Office for HP outilined his belief that we are in the early stages of a major shift. As…

Google serves as first line of defense during Russia’s invasion of Georgia (A plug for the cloud)

By G C Network | August 25, 2008

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, “As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google. In…

Apptis and Servervault announce Fedcloud

By G C Network | August 22, 2008

On August 18th, Apptis announced a partnership with ServerVault to offer a trusted cloud computing environment to federal agencies. Called Fedcloud they are offering a federally compliant, on-demand infrastructure that…

SOA-R Educational Series Schedule Changes

By G C Network | August 21, 2008

Since launching the SOA-R series back in July, cloud computing has become a hot topic among national security professionals. Evidence of this high level of interest is obvious from the…

Comments from Mr. Robert Carey, DON CIO and Army COS General George W. Casey, Jr

By G C Network | August 20, 2008

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to listen to both Mr. Robert Carey, CIO, Department of the Navy, and General George W. Casey, Jr., Chief…

Akamai at SOA-R Session

By G C Network | August 19, 2008

Had another very enlightening SOA-R session last week. Of particular note to me was Akamai’s vision of cloud computing. As presented by Fran Trently, Sr. Director Public Sector, Akamai is…

Six Benefits of Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 18, 2008

A Public CIO magazine article, to be published later this fall, will highlight six main benefits of cloud computing. Reduced Cost Increased Storage Highly Automated Flexibility More Mobility Allows IT…

Joab Jackson, in his “Cloud computing leaving relational databases behind” article, makes some pretty interesting points on the incompatibility of relational databases with cloud-based infrastructures. He first list the various cloud optimized databases:

And then notes that they all have cloud computing-specific characteristics.

  • They can be run in distributed environments,
  • None of them are transactional in nature, and
  • They all sacrifice some advanced querying capability for faster performance.

Since the national security community literally lives and dies by the information in their relational databases, what does that mean if the community adopts cloud technology in order to benefit from the scalability and economy?

The key issue here is that in cloud implementations, database material is spread across different locations. Executing complex queries with relational databases across vast geographic distances can slow response time. It is also difficult to design and maintain an architecture to replicate relational data across different locations and keep that data in sync if one location goes down.

Since cloud implementations are seemingly the wave of the future, community CIO’s and analyst alike need to start thinking about the implications of the coming transition from relational databases today.

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network

3 Comments

  1. Randall on October 7, 2008 at 10:30 am

    I don’t know Kevin, I think relational db’s will be around for a long time.

    You know when we start thinking in the cloud, we think every cloud computing application is going to have millions of users so can’t use a relational database, but there are lots and lots of problems that relational databases solve — in the cloud — very easily.

    And there are some very scalable websites built on top of relational databases.



  2. James Urquhart on October 8, 2008 at 5:03 pm

    I second Randall’s comment. If your database is focused on complex set-based analytics, then stick to a relational database. If you need to map the results of that analytics to a large audience, replicate results from the relational query results to either static pages or perhaps a Map-Reduce based data store. It doesn’t have to be a “paradigm shift” in any way shape or form.



  3. Anonymous on April 30, 2009 at 1:53 am

    ^^Thanks!!

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