Challenges and Trends in Information Management

Abstract

From a customer perspective, three main dimensions are relevant when evaluating and procuring database systems: functionality, performance, and total cost of ownership. Traditionally, database research has focused a lot on performance improvements of database systems, but less on new functionality and reducing the total cost of ownership. In this paper, we give our perspective on these three dimensions based on our experience in an industrial research laboratory. The paper is not intended to give a comprehensive overview of all activities, nor is it intended to provide an in-depth discussion of the research work we illustrate. Instead it highlights a set of activities at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and outlines open research challenges that could be tackled by universities in Germany and elsewhere. With respect to the performance dimension, systems are being designed to be more scalable, by utilizing hardware support to evaluate queries close to the storage subsystem (Netezza), and by massively parallel systems like Google’s map/reduce, which go beyond classical shared-nothing or shared-disk parallelism. That said performance seems to play a less important role in modern database systems as users are willing to trad