Databases in the cloud are expected to impact the database industry more than any other upcoming technology, according to a database trends survey of more than 1,200 industry professionals.
More than one-third of those surveyed (34%) selected databases in the cloud as the technology destined to wield the greatest impact on the database community. Virtualization ranked second at 27%, followed by solid state disks (15%), visual tuning (12%), and collaboration technologies (8%).
“With cloud database offerings from Amazon and Microsoft and a slew of open source providers taking off, most database professionals will be involved with the technology in some form in 2011,” said Scott Walz, senior director of product management for
“The long-term scalability and provisioning benefits of database in the cloud should eventually pay off, but in the meantime, database administrators [DBAs] will have to learn an entirely new playbook for managing distributed data in a less than predictable and controlled environment,” he added.
The survey also provided an insight into the issues most troubling DBAs. When asked what database-related issues keep them up at night, production database performance was cited by 43%. Database downtime was second at 38%, followed by performance degradation (31%), and database server hardware performance (29%).
There seemed to be a general consensus around the biggest project challenges facing DBAs. A time crunch was the biggest factor, with 43% complaining of not having enough time to accomplish work tasks, while 40% said poor planning was a huge challenge. Next was poor or no requirements, cited by 33%, followed by scope creep (31%) and slow or inefficient tools (30%).
The survey was conducted in the third quarter of 2010.
This story has been reprinted with permission from
