The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Search: Next-generation RDBMS Structured Search
Search technology advances have been capturing top headlines on a nearly daily basis. From our perspective, the evolution of tools in the Enterprise Search space is what is driving all the excitement. That includes offerings from FAST, Autonomy Endeca, and more recently initiatives from IBM/Yahoo, Google, Powerset, and many many others.
The current focus clearly has been on search over unstructured data. Comparatively, search over structured data using relational database systems hasn’t really changed that much. Of course Open Source companies like MySQL are changing the relational database market dynamics. Products like Oracle’s TimesTen realtime database and Oracle’s BerkeleyDB embedded database are pushing the limits of the relational database. And work like what Formtek’s partner Dynatrek is doing in the area of federated structured searches is interesting too. But the data storage techniques and algorithms of relational systems haven’t changed that much.
What’s interesting now is what Vertica is doing in RDBMS. Michael StoneBreaker, Vertica’s CTO and chief architect behind the INGRES and POSTGRES databases, is pioneering a new concept in RDBMS called a ‘column-oriented’ RDBMS. The new technique is well suited for applications like data warehousing, compliance, and business intelligence.
Vertica has raised $23.5+ million and yesterday named Oracle SVP Jerry Held as Chairman. Ray Lane, former Oracle Vice President, is also an investor in the company.
The new architecture allows Vertica’s database to be ultrafast, allowing even ad hoc queries over terabyte-sized databases to be speedy. With innovators like Vertica, structured search may become interesting again.
