The parallels between Oil and Relational Database Management Systems

We are addicted to Relational Database Management Systems. It's a safe, well-understood mature technology. Whenever we have
persistence requirements, our knee-jerk reaction is typically "let's stick it in a relational database". And why not indeed. It's not
a bad choice, and in some cases it may be your only choice.

Along the way, there have been some contenders to the crown. OODBMS - Object Oriented Database Management Systems spring to mind. But they never really took off, finding themselves pushed into a niche.

It kind of reminds me of our dependence on oil for energy. Instead of OPEC though, we have IBM, Oracle and Microsoft plus
I would include Sun (MySQL). I'd probably get slammed if I didn't include PostgreSQL in the mix too (although I would say this
is probably not high octane).

However, in 2008 things are a little different. There are some worthy alternatives you may want to check out. So what are the alternatives? Well, we have data grids. There are a bunch to chose from. Oracle Coherence is one that I first became familiar
with through my work at Delta (back when it was Tangosol). There are others available too now for both Java and .NET platforms.

Bigtable (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html) from Google and SimpleDB/S3 are also very interesting alternatives.

Next time you are working on designing a new system, you owe it to yourself to at least check out some alternatives.