Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community

Michael Stonebraker is a lightning rod in the database world. He knows his stuff, having helped create some of the most-popular database systems around — Postgres, Ingres and Vertica. One of his most-recent endeavors (among many), VoltDB, is an in-memory OLTP (online transaction processing) system he claims is two orders of magnitude faster than legacy options.

Yet, Stonebraker’s opinions throughout the years have been fairly controversial, garnering support on one hand and vehement opposition on the other. In 2011, for example, he told me that Facebook was trapped in a MySQL “fate worse than death” — and, boy, the backlash came fast and furious.

Stonebraker came on our Structure Show podcast this week to talk about his assessment of the database market as it stands today, including the fate of NoSQL, Oracle and, yes, Facebook’s MySQL installation. Here are some of the highlights, but if anyone into building, using or investing in database technologies will probably want to hear it all. (P.S. It’s a longer episode than usual, with Barb Darrow and I talking about the news for the first 18 or so minutes.)

Download this Episode

Subscribe in iTunes

The Structure Show RSS Feed

One size will fit none

“In every vertical market I can think of, there’s some better way to solve your problem than using a legacy relational database system,” Stonebraker said.

He has actually been preaching this idea for a while, but now it seems more legitimate than ever. There are columnar architectures for analytics, in-memory architectures for transactions, and, of course, NoSQL architectures for simple key-value operations and new data types. Even graph databases are catching on commercially.

Want proof of how mainstream these new types of databases are becoming? “Obamacare, for better or for worse, is being launched on a NoSQL database system,” Stonebraker noted.

There’s room for a lot of winners

“There will be three or four or five, or maybe six, categories of database systems architected very differently, in each one of which there will be two to three successful vendors,” Stonebraker predicted. “And I think the core, meaning the legacy relational database system, is going to slowly shrink. This all will play out over perhaps a decade.”

NoSQL will come back down to earth

“My prediction is that NoSQL will come to mean not yet SQL,” he said.”… “Cassandra and Mongo have both announced what looks like, unless you squint, a high-level language that’s basically SQL.”

The perceived value of a purely low-level language all but gone, Stonebraker thinks NoSQL systems will also come to embrace ACID capabilities. It might already be happening.

“I think the biggest NoSQL proponent of non-ACID has been historically a guy named Jeff Dean at Google, who’s responsible for, essentially, most to all of their database offerings. And he recently … wrote a system called Spanner,” Stonebraker explained. “Spanner is a pure ACID system. So Google is moving to ACID and I think the NoSQL market will move away from eventual consistency and toward ACID.”

Oracle will feel the squeeze from SAP

“The other thing I think that’s just real fascinating that hasn’t really gotten much press yet is that SAP is in the database business and that … SAP customers are Oracle’s biggest customer right now,” Stonebraker said. “Among the elephants, there’s going to be a duke-it-out between Oracle and SAP.”

It’s a little early for this to really happen yet, and we don’t yet know how SAP’s customers will respond to any attempted persuasion to switch databases, but, he added, “My expectation is that SAP will make a compelling case for their … customers switching off of Oracle and onto HANA.”

Facebook will keep searching, possibly fruitlessly, for a MySQL replacement

“Facebook has one of the hardest data management problems on the planet,” Stonebraker said. “They have been trying for several years to move off of MySQL and onto something else, and so far they haven’t found anything else that can do the problem at the scale they need done.”

It’s a step back from his stance a couple years ago, perhaps based on some of the information Facebook has shared on its MySQL efforts since then and how well it has continued to hold up. However, it’s still not an endorsement of MySQL as much as it is a recognition of Facebook’s database chops.

Generally speaking, Stonebraker said (falling back on a familiar, but funny, turn of phrase), “The code bases the legacy vendors are selling right now are 25 years old, and it’s time for them to be retired and sent to the home for obsolete software.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user semisatch.