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From: tim@ohday.sybase.com (Tim Wood)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Is RDBMS unproven technology?  (Flames to follow....)
Summary: see puddin' for proof
Message-ID: <10371@sybase.sybase.com>
Date: 1 Aug 90 18:07:03 GMT
References: <1073@ashton.UUCP>
Sender: news@Sybase.COM
Organization: Sybase, Inc.
Lines: 67

In article <1073@ashton.UUCP> tomr@ashton.UUCP (Tom Rombouts) writes:
>Are relational databases an unproven technology regarding
>performance?  
>
>....A key tenet of the report is that RDBMS technology has been
>available for 20 years but still has not been proved in large,
>complex applications.  The report notes that users associate
>these products with poor system performance, even though they may
>be flexible and easier to implement.  The article then goes on 
>to cite a firm that is reluctant to replace IMS with DB2, and
>discusses other sites that use a mixture of relational and
>possibly non-relational systems.

There isn't really enough information in your excerpt to comment on the
article.  The question, "Relational, yes or no?" is becoming less and
less germaine.  The question most important to most users is "Will
widget W solve my problem, P?"

Relational systems have so far been deployed in smaller-scale
applications than have hierarchical and network systems.  This is due
to several factors: relational is "newer" (that is, the technology
existed long before successful commercial products) and the older
database architectures were deployed in the days when nearly all
commercial computing resources were centralized and operating in a
batch-processing environment.  In that environment, updates and access
to the database are relatively rigidly controlled.

The appeal of relational systems has been the promise of flexible
access to the database by users far removed from the DP department.
The trend toward decentralized access has been strengthened by the
growth of processing power directly available to individual users, and
by the changing nature of applications themselves.

Relational systems lend themselves well to distributed database, where
by definition there will be fewer, if any, centralized points of
transaction processing activity.  So, an individual site in the
distributed relational database may look "slow" compared to IMS on an
IBM-MVS 3090, but the aggregate throughput of the networked database
can be prodigious.  

This is not to say that there is some theoretical limit to the
performance of individual relational database engines.  Indeed, a major
focus of the industry now is to develop local transaction processing
speeds that rival those of older architectures on a platform of similar
scale.  Today's technology is proving (already has, actually) that the
assertion that relational is slow is out-of-date.  What's more,
relational technology is solving the problems of distributed
applications better than the older architectures, at transaction speeds
that are so far adequate for most applications.  A recent Digital
Review survey asked relational users about their throughput
requirements.  They found that about 90% of applications required no
more than about 12TPS.  This TPS number will surely increase, as will
the ability of relational systems to carry more load.

Organizational reluctance to replace existing non-relational systems
is now very understandable.  Replacements will occur as the economic
benefits of the distributed high-performance relational model increasingly
outweigh the costs of changing.  Actual replacements will be preceded
by gradual integration of RDBMS into the organization's DP framework.
It is important for relational products to allow connection with
existing heterogenous systems, rather than requiring their replacement.
-TW
---
Sybase, Inc. / 6475 Christie Ave. / Emeryville, CA / 94608	  415-596-3500
tim@sybase.com          {pacbell,pyramid,sun,{uunet,ucbvax}!mtxinu}!sybase!tim
	One day, when I can afford enough lawyers, I will speak for
	    a whole company.  For now, I speak just for myself.