30+ Year Old Database Architecture: DB2, Oracle, Postgres, Teradata, Sybase, and More…

As you look at the enterprise RDBMS marketplace today you will find something shocking… almost every product in the market is built based on designs and concepts that are over thirty years old. IBM’s System R grew into DB2 and influenced Oracle before 1980. Ingres, developed before 1980, became Postgres which became Netezza and Greenplum and more. Teradata was a fresh start… around 1980.

This is not a bad thing in its own right… but imagine the hardware architectures these systems were designed and optimized for. Maybe DB2 was built for a multi-core mainframe… maybe Oracle too… maybe. Memory was tiny… so memory management was important and memory was used sparingly. Data sizes were tiny. Consider the fact that Teradata named the company based on the belief that someday way beyond the planning horizon some customers might get to a terabyte of data.

The reality is that these old designs are inefficient. They have hacked the old code to continuously extend their products. I mean this as a compliment. It is not trivial engineering to find tweaks and tack-ons that make old code work on new hardware architectures. Teradata and Netezza and Greenplum designed ways to use multiple address spaces to take advantage of multiple cores. Oracle tacked-on a shared-nothing I/O subsystem to a shared-everything architecture to stretch.

But these hacks are not efficient.

Yale is working on some new-new stuff (see here). HANA is based on a completely different design (see here). The NoSQL vendors have bent the ACID-tested rules, if not always the fundamental approaches.

I can’t help but believe that in one of these new approaches is a path forward.

If you would like to read some history of the start here is a cool link.