The worldwide database market is now worth over £12bn and IBM,
Microsoft and Oracle are all hoping that XML and Net support will
increase their market share. Ross Bentley reports
The worldwide database market is now worth over £12bn and IBM,
Microsoft and Oracle are all hoping that XML and Net support will
increase their market share. Ross Bentley reportsAs the database market mushrooms, the leading suppliers are
adding Internet-related functions to their products in an attempt
to attract users.
A report by Dataquest, released last week, shows the worldwide
database market grew 18% to reach more than £12bn in 1999. And
while there will always be a place for database suppliers who cater
for niche application areas, the report found that the database
world is headed by a trinity of dominant players - Oracle, IBM and
Microsoft.
All three are bullish at the moment. Claim and counter-claim
fill this space, and each supplier offers functionality to ease
users' migration from a competitor to their own database
package.
IBM, for one, is making no secret of the importance it places on
the struggle for marketshare.
E-business
According to Mike Blake, a data management consultant with IBM,
the company's DB2 universal database is the biggest investment area
within IBM software, with the company planning to recruit another
500 DB2 staff worldwide across software engineering, sales and
marketing in the next two years.
The spirit of rivalry has intensified of late: both IBM and
Microsoft have recently announced new versions of their databases.
IBM's DB2 version 7 shipped last month, while Microsoft has made
the beta version of SQL server 2000 available, with a full release
date set for August. Both these fresh products offer support for
XML files and further embrace the Internet.
XML is swiftly gaining prominence as the standard format for
describing and tagging data and thus exchanging documents from
business to business. DB2's and SQL Server's support underlines
this.
Now users of both databases can define, store and retrieve
XML-based documents within the database both as whole XML documents
or as "decomposed" documents, where the data is stored as sets of
objects or tags and then reassembled into full XML format prior to
use.
This, of course, will give IT managers a choice in how they
choose to store their XML files depending on their predilection and
business situation.
However, Rob Hailstone, research director at Bloor Research,
predicted that in the current climate, where XML coverage is not
really established between business partners, more organisations
will tend to store decomposed XML files. But, as inter-business
dealings build XML streams, Hailstone believes the storing of
complete XML documents will come into its own.
Unsophisticated XML
This, said Hailstone, is because at the moment we are only
seeing a fairly unsophisticated use of XML between companies. For
the most part, translation of an XML document is obtained by
breaking it down into common tag sets.
In the fullness of time, as the use of XML reaches a more
competent level, users will know that a certain XML document has
certain properties and will be able to store it as a complete
document. This scenario, however, will require further
standardisation in the XML arena.
Oracle embraced XML with the launch of its Oracle 8i database
over a year ago and has since included XML support within its
development and intelligence tools. Gary Pugh, data server product
manager at Oracle, said there is a real enthusiasm for XML within
the Oracle users community.
According to Pugh, 60% of delegates at last year's Open World
Oracle user conference stated that the main factor in deciding on
Oracle products was its support for XML.
"There is no doubt that XML will become the standard for
describing documents," said Pugh.
"From an IT manager's point of view this means he will be able
to integrate his applications with those of other businesses, from
the developer's angle it means he will only have to learn say, two
languages such as XML and Java rather than learn numerous
[application programming interfaces] when building applications" he
added.
Caution
As the XML bandwagon rolls on and the database wars rage,
Hailstone has a word of caution for sites considering migrating
data from an established database to updated versions or to
competitors offerings. He does not recommend meddling with
applications and data already established on a database unless that
database turns out to be a bad choice and migration is a
necessity.
Hailstone cites the change in operating procedures, the need for
re-coding and having to retrain technical staff as reasons not to
reject a satisfactory database in favour of a newer version.
If a site plans to run with a certain make of database or to
adopt one of the new releases, Hailstone advises doing so with
recently started projects rather than established business
applications.
With the database at the crux of e-business, the last thing you
want to do, he said, is change it once the application has gone
live.
Putting database applications on the Web