It’s been 42 years since Ed Codd announced his famous 12 Rules on how to store data in 2-dimensional tables and gave birth to the Relational Database. Codd’s choice of the word “relational” had nothing to do with “relationship” or things “being in relationship” as one might assume. He was referring to the mathematical term “relation”, which means “table”. A table is the weakest possible structure one could choose to to capture relationships. As a result, you have to eliminate most of relationships between things if you want to store them in tables (non-value-added effort). Then when users want to consume the information, you must somehow reconstruct those same relationships in various business intelligence or other overlays (a lot more non-value added effort).
In the last 42 years, everything in the world of data management technology has evolved with dizzying speed, except this one area. We still build most of our information systems with 42-year old technology that causes enormous frustration, cost and struggle. The prime example is the data warehouse, a business-critical infrastructure, where the failure rate is several times the success rates despite decades of experience, experiment and effort.
Relational technology has reached its limits. No organization can abandon it instantly, and it’s time for all organizations to start weaning themselves off it. Forty-two years later, we have invented and proven a technology that easily captures information will all the context and relationships that the organization wants. In this new world, it’s inconceivable to think of eliminating the full context in order to store data in databases and then reconstructing it all somehow so we can report it back to users.
That’s not all there is to this new technology. There are other capabilities that make it essential and mandatory for the next 42 years:
We will see a profound shift in this decade as the IT migrates out of Codd’s relational technology and into this next generation of information system.
It’s an age-old process. We strip out was no longer works and fold in the better idea in order to create leaner, more shareholder friendly, more growth-powered organizations.
That’s the process we believe in.