Ramon Chen’s post Simplification Through Specialization (later repeated on the Rainstor blog) rang quite a bell with me, also on the personal level. But here’s why specialization is better for some:
If you were going to spend big bucks, you’d expect results and performance to match your use cases and requirements. With Big Data upon us and years of data warehousing experience, we already know that transactional RDBMS’ are not the best repositories for analytics. Furthermore Teradata, Netezza and a cadre of new providers such as Cloudera (with Hadoop), Aster Data, Greenplum, Paraccel and others are further specializing in big data analytics & insights.
Similarly, Oracle and other RDBMS’ with all their glorious complexity should be the least likely repository to keep massive amounts of data if long term retention is your focus. Would you use your Ferrari to store your furniture? Features such as two phase commit, referential integrityand even update would be considered over kill for immutable retention.
More on specialization vs. general purpose over the next few days, so check back tomorrow.