Hadoop and Bigtable
Are Apache Hadoop and Google’s Bigtable becoming the major threat for the relational database?
The relational database is the dominent database till now. When Object Oriented Database came into market. Everybody at that time expected that Object Oriented Database was the evolutionary step in the database and it would replace all the relational databases. But it never happened. The main thing we should note is that although Object Oriented Programming language is so popular, the Object Oriented Database failed. If we look closely for the failure of OODBMS’s against traditional RDBMS then its due to the lack of interoperability with a great number of features and tools that we use with SQL like reporting tools, OLAP tools, backups and recovery standards. Moreover OODBMS had weakness on query support due to the lacking of formal mathematical foundation.
Now the google’s Bigtable and Apache Hadoop seems promising threat to relational database. Although big giants like Google and Yahoo had successfully implemented these distributed databases, it has lots of flaws.
Major Flaw of these distributed database is it does not support transactional systems and they are vendor dependent and not Portable. If your data is in Google’s BigTable, you can’t pull it out. No big enterprise company wants to have their data elsewhere but they want everything on their own hardware.
The relational database has its own beauty. Multiple applications work on the common database and uses tools like Reporting Services, OLAP, Integration Services. It would be quite difficult to replace the relational database.
The performance and high availability provided by BigTable and Hadoop had given very good opportunities for the Developers to choose between Relational Databases and Distributed Databases. It is on the grave of future that whether distributed databases will become more mature and popular or it will fail against traditional relational databases.
