Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Onward and Upward

Five years after the initial edition of this book, we’re still in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of data storage options. It’s hard to predict exactly what will evolve out of this explosion in the coming years but we can be fairly certain that the pure domination of any particular strategy (relational or otherwise) is unlikely. Instead, we’ll see increasingly specialized databases, each suited to a particular (but certainly overlapping) set of ideal problem spaces. And just as there are jobs today that call for expertise specifically in administrating relational databases (DBAs), we are going to see the rise of their nonrelational counterparts.

Databases, like programming languages and libraries, are another set of tools ...