Introduction to the Active Everywhere Database

Accelerate hybrid cloud

Published September 2018

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For almost half a century, the relational database management system (RDBMS) has been the dominant model for database management. This more than 40 years old relational architecture powers most of the database management systems in use today. It provides powerful mechanisms to store and query structured data under strong consistency and transaction guarantees, and has reached an unmatched level of reliability for yesterday’s workloads.

However, today's business needs are forcing data management into new use cases, such as managing interactions with constantly-connected devices and websites, powering and managing social networks, handling multi-structured data and machine-generated files, etc. The amount of useful data in some modern application areas has become so distributed and vast, and the speed at which that data moves so fast, that it cannot be stored or processed by traditional database solutions. User-generated content in social networks and data retrieved from large sensor networks are two of the many such examples where traditional relational databases are being pushed beyond their limits. These data systems were designed for fixed schemas and centralized workloads, and not for more high throughput, always-on, massive scaleout and flexible data needs.