Database Horizons

Computerworld - The modern database era began in 1970, when E.F. Codd published his paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." His ideas enabled the logical manipulation of data to be independent of its physical location, greatly simplifying the work of application developers.

Now we are poised for another leap forward. Databases will scale to gargantuan proportions, span multiple locations and maintain information in heterogeneous formats. And they will be autonomous and self-tuning. The major database vendors are pursuing these goals in different ways.

Thirty years ago, IBM researcher Pat Selinger invented "cost-based" query optimization, by which searches against relational databases such as IBM's DB2 minimized computer resources by finding the most efficient access methods and paths. Now Selinger, vice president of data management architecture and technology, is leading an effort at IBM called Leo—for Learning Optimizer—that she says will push DB2 optimization into a new realm.

IBM researcher Pat Selinger

Selinger says Leo will be most helpful in large and complex databases, and in databases where interdata relationships exist but aren't explicitly declared by database designers. Leo is likely to be included in commercial releases of DB2 in about three years, she says.

Microsoft Corp. says users will never be persuaded to dump everything—e-mail, documents, audio/video, pictures, spreadsheets and so on—into one gigantic database. Therefore, the software vendor is developing technology that will allow a user to seamlessly reach across multiple, heterogeneous data stores with a single query.

	Jennifer Widom, a computer science professor at Stanford

The technology will appear in 18 months in SQL Server. It will be added to other Microsoft products in ensuing years.