Stonebraker on possible niches in the database world
The ACM Queue runs an interview of Michael Stonebraker, founder of Ingres, Illustra, Cohera and a bunch of other database companies. He’s interviewed by Margo Seltzer, CTO of Sleepycat Software, the company behind BerkeleyDB. Stonebraker discusses various issues in modern database and data warehousing world, including niche opportunities for new companies in the field (found this linkvia Greg Linden):
Text is the fourth market. None of the big text vendors, such as Google and Yahoo, use databases; they never have. They didn’t start there, because the relational databases were too slow from the get-go. Those guys have all written their own engines. It’s the same case in scientific and intelligence databases. Most of these clients have large arrays, so array data is much more popular than tabular data. If you have array data and use special-purpose technology that knows about arrays, you can clobber a system in which tables are used to simulate arrays.