Cloud Databases

Stateless Computing

By G C Network | August 15, 2008

A few days ago I read a review of Merrill Lynch’s Jeffrey Birnbaum LinuxWorld keynote on stateless computing. “With stateless computing, users’ settings and data are automatically saved to the…

Cloud Services

By G C Network | August 14, 2008

38% of 456 business technology professionals in a Information Week survey indicated that they currently use or will consider using services from a cloud provider. This seems much betterthan the…

Amazon, Elastra and the New Enterprise Data Center

By G C Network | August 13, 2008

Last week Amazon made an investment into Elastra. Some see this as Amazon’s enterprise play. Others see it as move towards the viability of private clouds. I see it as…

Microsoft Midori

By G C Network | August 12, 2008

Last week word got out that Microsoft’s new research project codenamed Midori. According to Information Week “the Midori system is being called Microsoft’s first cloud-based OS, and it could one…

Dell Trademarking Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 11, 2008

There has been quite a bit of chatter lately over Dell’s attempt to patent “cloud computing”. Last week, the US Patent and Trade Office put an end to those aspirations…

Rob Enderle Cautions on Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 8, 2008

Words of caution from Rob Enderle in “The Real Truth and Technology and IT”: “The key to success in the cloud will be keeping solutions simple, plus understanding and mitigating…

3 Important Point for Federal Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 7, 2008

Point 1: In May, Verizon and AT&T were awarded a DHS task order for just under $1B to provide telecommunications services to the department. Verizon won the lead provider’s spot…

A Cloud Methodology

By G C Network | August 7, 2008

Although this was published in June, I just saw it and felt it was to good not to repeat: A Methodology for Cloud Computing Architecture Peel off the applications individually,…

IBM Invests Nearly $400M on Cloud Computing Centers

By G C Network | August 6, 2008

In a press release last week, IBM says that it will spend $360 million to build its most sophisticated, state-of-the-art data center at its facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP),…

Cloud Computing and the NCOIC

By G C Network | August 5, 2008

According to their website, The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) has scheduled a session on cloud computing at their upcoming plenary session in September. In case you haven’t heard…

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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