Emerging technologies will be tied to data management

PUNE: Data warehousing market has grown to $6.9 billion and with players such

as Oracle, Sybase, IBM and Teradata firmly entrenched, it is clear that emerging

technologies will be tied to data management in the near future, said Georgia

Institute of Technology’s College of Computing, Prof Sham Navathe.

Navathe was in Pune to conduct a workshop on ‘Database Technologies and

Challenges’ organized by the Global Information Technology Academy (GITA).

Prof Navathe termed data warehouse as a decision support database that is

maintained separately from the organizations operational databases.

With a growing complexity of information, users are now increasingly looking

for a better interface, more visualization, more animation and different

paradigms for search, querying, browsing and navigation.

The general application challenges, according to Prof Navathe, were handling

multiple dimensions of information and converting raw data into meaningful

information. He said the current research thrusts was on building new data

models for new data types and relationships, methodologies for designing large

scale applications, parallel, mobile replicated database processing.

Database professionals now face the challenge of learning the application,

applying database techniques to help in applications and applying techniques

outside DB area to DB management. Prof Navathe predicted a wider variety of

applications in the future ranging from education, weather forecasting to

electronic commerce and envisaged more variety of users.

Hence there is a greater need for domain experts who can also understand DB

modeling and design and there will be more demands on performances for scaling

larger databases and staying within a reasonable response time, he said.

The future scenarios for databases would be databases that refresh themselves

by linking up with multiple sites and systems, databases that migrate with the

users and are part of different federations and databases that adapt to users'

needs. There will come a time when databases will prompt users when new and

relevant information arrives and delivers information in an appropriate form.

Emerging technologies will be tied to data management. For instance, there

would be communicating databases, more intelligence would be part of data

management and multimedia, large-scale software with reuse and computer

supported cooperative work would be common place, he predicted. He also said

that researchers were now working towards attempting to merge data base

technology with web technology.

Prof Navathe also spoke at length on `Intermittently synchronized databases:

Data Management for Mobile Worksgroups' where he said that the use of wireless

connectivity and PDAs, handheld computing devices were on rise and centralized

database repositories were required to serve these work groups to keep them

fairly updated and consistent.