|
| Featured Contents |
| Question of the Day |
|
| The Voice of the DBA |
Daily Coping Tip Learn a new skill from a friend or share one of yours with them I also have a thread at SQLServerCentral dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate. For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar. My items will be on my blog, feel free to share yours. |
Cloud First Software Watching the evolution of SQL Server and the Azure SQL Database (ASD) variant has been interesting across the last decade. For a long time, ASD felt crippled compared to the on-premises product. The last few years, however, it seems that ASD is getting features first, which then slip into a release that I can download and run locally. It's a cloud-first database now, even though there isn't parity with both products. In my career, I've worked with a number of platforms in production environments. One of those is Db2, though that's often felt like a legacy platform. I've rarely seen users starting new projects on DB2, though they might add some new databases, especially on AS/400, mainframe, or Linux platforms. I never thought Db2 was less capable than other choices, but I just don't see it used very often. There's an article that notes IBM is moving to a cloud-first version of Db2, where there will be a cloud version coming first, then "traditional" releases. I assume this means a model similar to ASD and SQL Server, which makes sense. It's much quicker to develop and deploy to the cloud, and test things behind feature flags with a limited audience. Those items that work well can then be bundled up for a versioned release on-premises. I don't know that I think Db2 will gain a lot of market share beyond what it has with this announcement, but it does make me think this is the model that a lot of companies will adopt if they even sell software for download. Most companies seem to want to move to a SaaS (software as a service) model where they can "rent" you access to code rather than deal with the struggles of supporting an install on your machine with who-knows-what configuration. I get why this is attractive to companies. I also get the struggles of consumers. For some things, sure, I'll rent access. Music makes sense. Some software makes sense, but others worry me. Already I can see that companies that control the data, and its format, might be poor choices for consumers. If I don't like your software, can I still get whatever data I have stored with you? Is there any way to port this to another system? I don't want to see regulations deciding how data and software should be implemented, but I would like to see some contract requirements with consumers that ensure the ability to leave a platform. Companies ought to be required to provide a way to extract out data into a common format, allowing me to move my pictures, tax data, sales records, health data, etc. to a new provider if I choose. This is often easy to do in databases, and many people know how to extract data. The harder problem becomes when higher-level vendors, those building applications, want to use proprietary formats. I don't mind that, but I do mind not being able to extract my data if I choose. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums |
|
| Featured Contents |
