One Size Does Not Fit All in DB Systems

The past 25 years of commercial DBMS development can be summed up in a single phrase: "One size fits all." The traditional DBMS architecture (originally designed and optimized for business data processing) has been used to support many data-centric applications, with widely varying characteristics and requirements. The commercial database market is beginning to transform into a number of segments—most notably, OLTP vs. data warehousing—each of which is defined by a specific workload. Innovative "purpose-built" independent database engines are now being widely adopted to satisfy specific workloads. Picking the right engine for a given workload is a new challenge, and doing this well can offer discontinuous benefits in terms of performance, scale, maintainability, and concurrency.