Best Relational Database

Aug 3, 2016

The rise of new data types over the past 10 years has led to new ways of thinking about data, and new data storage and management technologies such as Hadoop, NewSQL, and NoSQL.

However, despite all the new technologies that have emerged in the last 10 years, one thing is clear: the relational database management system which has been the enterprise workhorse for decades will remain a critical component of the data architecture.

According to The Real World Of The Database Administrator, a report based on a survey among 300 database administrators and others charged with managing corporate data, although there was a relative diversity in the use of database platforms with more than 20 different brands cited by respondents, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 LUW, and SAP Sybase ASE were the dominant RDBMSs reported to be running mission-critical data, with Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server clearly the leaders.

The study maintains despite the emergence of new information technologies, their rise should not obscure the fact that “structured data in relational databases still provides the foundation for the information infrastructure in many, if not most, companies, and will do so in most organizations for the foreseeable future.” It goes on to point out that the ways in which companies can exploit structured data is far from exhausted – and that DBAs still represent the front-line personnel for data management in most enterprises.

“For all the interest in how to capture and manage unstructured and semi-structured data,” the Dell study states, “structured data remains the bedrock of the information infrastructure in most companies.” According to the report, two-thirds of the respondents indicated that structured data represented at least 75% of the data under management and almost one-third said that their organizations are not yet actively managing unstructured data.

The relational database has been at the center of large-scale information management for several decades and may be expected to do so for the foreseeable future, the report maintains.