That is, what does the word 'database' mean to you, today? Is it that series of repositories that you and your corporation access to run your day to day business--containing very structured items like product names, numbers, descriptions, and customer names, ids, etc.?
Or does it perhaps extend to your desktop--to your personal knowledge management hopes and dreams? A virtual repository of all of those emails you have been squirreling away for days, months, perhaps years? And all of those nifty documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and the plethora of other forms of bits and bytes that you have been saving for just the right time and project?
CRN Editor In Chief Michael Vizard interviews IBM's database pioneer Pat Selinger in IBM Technologist Sees Expanded Role For Databases.
Here's an excerpt from this interview:
CRN: Ultimately, how does XML change the role of the database?
Selinger: I spent the first 27 of my 29 years in database looking at data that's very structured, with a definition of databases that were tied to things like warehouse inventory, banking and other kinds of very structured, classic kind of databases, which was then extended to some extent with the object relational model. But another 85 percent of the data in the world is stored in other formats. My job as a database expert is really to extend the power of searching provided by this high level specification to all of the things that need to be done to all of the data that you have, whether it's in Word documents or spreadsheets or presentations or e-mail. That's really where the understanding and the ability to deal with XML will come in. I see us extending that database to store other kind of data, to be able to do archiving of an e-mail, for example, and to have that managed by a database engine and to be able to search it using database searching techniques so you can find all the e-mails sent to a certain person or you can find all the e-mails referencing a certain stock transaction. This is something you need to do for managing your business, something you need to do for understanding your customers and something you may need to do for regulatory compliance.
K-Collector Topics: Corporations email Interviews Knowledge Management Productivity XML IBM