Does the Database Community Have an Identity Crisis?
RDBMSs are as powerful as ever and are still improving rapidly. If you look at &quot;what&#x27;s new&quot; in Oracle 12c, SQL Server 2016, VoltDB and Vertica; you can see they&#x27;re not maintenance mode. I think calling them fossils that should be burned down to fuel the next thing is way off.<p>IMO the main thing RDBMSs have failed to do is to capture the new generation of developers who don&#x27;t have the desire or the patience to learn SQL, relational concepts, various modeling techniques, and whatever sharding or shared nothing architectural fundamentals just to scale out. This generation wants to &quot;npm install magic-database&quot;, write everything in javascript, and push to the cloud without ever having to think about scaleout. This isn&#x27;t necessarily a problem with RDBMSs but RDBMSs could address it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;database&#x2F;121&#x2F;NEWFT&#x2F;chapter12102.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;database&#x2F;121&#x2F;NEWFT&#x2F;chapter12102.htm</a>
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[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.voltdb.com&#x2F;ReleaseNotes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.voltdb.com&#x2F;ReleaseNotes</a>
[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.dev.hpe.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Vertica-Blog&#x2F;What-s-New-in-Vertica-7-2-2&#x2F;ba-p&#x2F;235496" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.dev.hpe.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Vertica-Blog&#x2F;What-s-New-in-...</a>