Search DBMS Will Be King For BI

by Boris Evelson.

For years I've been predicting that relational DBMS will run out of steam when it comes to effectively managing and manipulating very large, heterogeneous (structured + unstructured) data sets for business intelligence. First, RDBMS were never designed and optimized for unstructured data (not just XML, which is structured data in my definition, but truly unstructured text pages). Second, there's just too much overhead and cost in RDBMS for handling OLTP functions. The result: search index DBMS will be king in BI and DSS in the future.

Today’s announcements that Microsoft may be buying Yahoo came several weeks early. On May 17th I would’ve gone on the record at Forrester IT Forum in Nashville by saying the following, and I quote from my presentation paper: “DBMS/BI vendor may buy a search company, to address the trend of increasing importance of unstructured data in BI and to obtain an early leading position in the space. I know it should be Oracle or IBM, but it probably won’t, since these guys will never admit that their relational DBMS cannot do something. Microsoft is a more likely contender since they know they won’t leapfrog IBM or Oracle in relational DBMS and they could use this opportunity to stick one to Google too.”

I thought Microsoft would buy somebody like Fast Search, but I guess that was too small for them.