1. Content Delivery Decisions
for Technology Strategists
Thursday, November 29, 2012
11:40 – 12:40
Joseph Bachana
President/Founder, DPCI
Leonor Ciarlone
Principal, LMC Communications
Peter O'Kelly
Principal Analyst, O'Kelly Associates
2. Overall Session Agenda
• Not Dead Yet: The Significant and Sustainable
Synergy of XML and SQL
• Convergence of Content Technologies in the
Open Source World
• Q&A
2
3. Agenda: Not Dead Yet
• Synopsis
• Complementary concerns
– Resources
– Relations
– Apps
– Admin/ops
• Perspectives and reality checks
• Recommendations
3
4. Synopsis: Not Dead Yet
• XML and SQL are, respectively, the global
standards for working with document- and Web-
oriented information and traditional database
management systems (DBMSs)
• However, both are also at least ostensibly under
siege, with, e.g.,
– Some application developers shifting their focus to
JavaScript (and JSON, the JavaScript Object Notation)
– Many software product marketing people and
investors touting the professed power of "NoSQL"
(and “NewSQL”) systems
4
5. Synopsis: Not Dead Yet
• The stakes are strategic, with ever-expanding
compliance and competitive considerations, and
with compelling new opportunities based on
– Big data
– Cloud services
– HTML5 clients
– Mobile devices
• [Spoiler alert: neither XML nor SQL is going away]
5
6. Agenda: Not Dead Yet
• Synopsis
• Complementary concerns
• Perspectives and reality checks
• Recommendations
6
7. Resources and Relations
• A digital information item dichotomy
– Resources (~unstructured information): “content”
• Digital artifacts optimized to convey stories
– Organized in terms of narrative, hierarchy, and sequence
• Examples: books, magazines, documents (e.g., PDF, Word),
Web pages, XBRL documents, video, hypertext…
– Relations (~structured information): “data”
• Application-independent descriptions of real-world things
and relationships
• Examples: business domain databases (e.g., customer, sales,
HR…), data.com, wikidata.org…
7
9. Separation of Concerns
• Back to basics
– XML (with namespaces, XSD, XPath, XQuery, XSLT, …) for
resources
• Presentation
• Structure
• Behavior
– SQL for relations
• Application/data independence
• Logical/physical data independence
• Related services for both information domains: identity,
authentication, authorization, logging, transactions,
indexing, dynamic storage optimization…
– Ideally handled by underlying information management systems
rather than applications
9
11. Agenda: Not Dead Yet
• Synopsis
• Complementary concerns
• Perspectives and reality checks
• Recommendations
11
12. Resource Perspectives
Resource Apps
Relation
Admin/Ops
• Every useful thing is a resource (document/page)
• SQL is for uncreative and obsessive data nerds
• Apps are interactive/compound resources
• Admin/ops: somebody else’s problem
12
13. Relation Perspectives
Apps
Relation
Resource
Admin/Ops
• Relations can describe all useful things
• Resource: XML compound data type instance
• Apps are interfaces for relation interaction
• Admin/ops: somebody else’s problem
13
14. Application Perspectives
Apps
Resource Relation
Admin/Ops
• Anything that’s not an app is just for archival
• Resource => XML => verbose/unwieldy
• Relation => SQL => impedance mismatch
• Admin/ops: somebody else’s problem
14
15. Admin/Ops Perspectives
Apps
Resource Relation
Admin/
Ops
• Robust/scalable admin/ops or we all go to jail
• Resource => XML => eXtra Mondo Large files
• Relation => SQL => a DBMS trying to be an OS
• Apps: most likely to break infrastructure
15
18. Modeling Abstractions
Resources Relations
Conceptual Documents and links; documents Entities, attributes, relationships, and
focused primarily on narrative, identifiers
hierarchy, and sequence
Logical Model: hypertext Model: extended relational
Language: XQuery (ideally…) Language: SQL
Physical Indexing (e.g., scalar data types, XML, and full-text), locking and isolation
levels (for transactions), federation, replication/synchronization, in-memory
databases, columnar storage, table spaces, caching, and more
18
19. A Resource Reality Check
• XML has some idiosyncrasies, but it’s beyond
good-enough for its primary target domain, and
it’s here to stay
– Indeed, XML is, in some respects, just getting started
• XQuery, in particular, is exceptionally powerful
• But XML should be made invisible to information
architects, application developers, and admin/ops
– They should work with tools that support their
respective levels of abstraction, but that still leverage
XML when appropriate
19
21. A Relation Reality Check
• SQL has some idiosyncrasies, but it’s beyond
good-enough for its primary target domain, and
it’s here to stay
– Being anti-SQL, ultimately, is being anti-set theory
• Not a good bet when you’re describing sets of things
• But SQL should be made invisible to information
architects, application developers, and admin/ops
– They should work with tools that support their
respective levels of abstraction, but that still leverage
SQL when appropriate
21
22. XML and SQL
• XML and SQL are sustainably
complementary
– When used appropriately
• XQuery was designed – by a
team including one of SQL’s
creators – to complement SQL
• The market-leading RDBMSs
can automatically ingest and
generate XML
• Some leading XML servers are
adding SQL support
22
23. An App Perspective Reality Check
• The dreaded “impedance mismatch” is mostly a
consequence of inadequate programming
languages and tools
• Reverting to a programs-have-files perspective
means ignoring decades of software engineering
evolution
• Using JavaScript doesn’t have to preclude the
effective use of XML and SQL
– But tools that don’t entail major compromises are
only now starting to appear
23
24. An Admin/Ops Reality Check
• DBMS evolution isn’t done yet
– Multi-model DBMSs are now the enterprise norm
• Including subsystems for XML, file steaming, spatial
data, and more
– Automatic “sharding”
• New extensions to logical/physical database
independence and database optimization
– A leading indicator: watch what Google does with
SQL (or “SQL-like” approaches) in BigQuery and
Spanner
24
25. Agenda: Not Dead Yet
• Synopsis
• Complementary concerns
• Perspectives and reality checks
• Recommendations
25
26. Recommendations
• Build consensus and establish clear criteria for
what to use when (and how)
– Otherwise people will often default to the tools
and technologies with which they’re most familiar
• And/or the most fun or résumé-enhancing
– Best practices start with effective modeling and
query formulation skills
• Reminder: XML and SQL should be invisible to most of
the people who benefit from using them
26
27. Recommendations
• Only invest in tools that don’t dumb-down
XML or SQL DBMS usage patterns
– RDBMS and XDBMS are exceptionally powerful
• But not when they’re demoted to serve as basic file
systems
– Many advocates of “NoSQL/NewSQL” systems
have large collections of simplifying assumptions
• Sometimes going beyond “… as simple as possible”
– With major compromises and trade-offs that are sometimes
not fully understood until far into a project lifecycle
27
28. Recommendations
• Start preparing now to fully leverage advances
such as
– Pervasive beyond-the-basics hypertext
– Multi-model DBMSs that apply XML/SQL synergy
• Especially high-performance XQuery/SQL integration
– Don’t discount the possibility that the DBMS
“usual suspects” (commercial and open source)
will eventually provide the most effective XML +
SQL products/services
28
29. Recap: Not Dead Yet
• XML and SQL are – and will continue to be –
respectively, the global standards for working with
document- and Web-oriented information and
traditional DBMSs
– Although they will ideally be invisible to most people
• Many of the alleged successors to XML- and SQL-
related technologies are more complementary than
competitive
– JavaScript tools can productively coexist with XQuery and
SQL, for example
– Most “NoSQL” and “NewSQL” developments are primarily
focused on the physical database layer, and aren’t in
conflict with evolving XML and SQL DBMSs
29
30. Recap: Not Dead Yet
• The stakes are strategic, with ever-expanding
compliance and competitive considerations,
and with compelling new opportunities
– Which are likely to accelerate rather than derail
XML and SQL market momentum
• This is an opportune time to build consensus
on and skills in related techniques and tools
30
Not exclusive – e.g., XML is also widely used for data interchange between applications
This is a high-level dichotomy – and not meant to be precise or mutually-exclusive (i.e., some info items have both resource and relation attributes)
This is meant to be illustrative – neither precise nor exhaustive
Not drawn to scale… This and the next 3 slides are intended to be semi facetious, but probably align well with vocational/parochial perspectives within many enterprises
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_EinsteinBelieved to be a paraphrasing – a simplification – of “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
Point of having a merged cell for physical: it’s all coming together – it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the underlying physical model services…Hypertext is not 1:1 with HTML – it’s beyond-the-basics hypertext as manifested, e.g., in Web publishing and collaboration-oriented systems/serversXQuery is not mainstream today, but it is exceptionally powerful and was co-developed in conjunction with XPath 2.0, and with a sustained focus on SQL synergy
“You’re soaking in it…” E.g., Oracle XML DB is automatically installed as part of Oracle Database 12c
