Future of Databases Will Be

Future of databases will be more oriented more towards supporting strategically-based business objectives, and less about being functionally defined. Database design will gradually include support for Business Process Management (BPM)-based workflows that bring greater levels of performance across entire organizations. To accomplish this, the adoption of Service oriented Architectures (SOA) will become more pervasive, encompassing functional areas of organizations and providing integration of processes as a result. In conjunction with the broader adoption of SOA-based architectures that force higher levels of relational database design that takes into process design and re-engineering so that strategic objectives can be attained.

Databases becoming Strategic Assets

Oracle's approach to defining their Service oriented Architecture (SOA) in their Fusion architecture, SAP's approach to the development of their NetWeaver platform, and Microsoft's approach with.Net all have pervasive integration support for database integration beyond their own respective applications. The need for cross-platform integration, where the Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and legacy databases are combined into a single platform to support and strengthen critical processes that companies rely on to achieve their objectives, is where the future of databases is going. The need for cross-platform integration, encompassing legacy systems beyond simple ODBC connections to more potent integration standards, is critical. Databases in the scenarios possible using SOA architectures will be much more strategic and central to any company's business model. Examples of this point are emerging from the early adopters of Fusion and NetWeaver. The use of SOA platforms for enabling databases to be integrated together to provide a single view of their warehouses, supply chains, making warehouse management significantly more productive yielding higher inventory turns and a reduction in inventory management costs. Benchmarking the contribution of greater levels of database integration and the role of SOA platforms has become even more critical given how uncertain the global economic climate is today. The use of business intelligence applications as a layer of SOA architectures, integrating to each database and providing scorecards and dashboards that align not only with strategies but also with the use of the databases themselves is accelerating with the growing reliance on data mining and analytics.