The Hindu Business Line : `Management of database getting commoditised'

THE global database management has become extremely commoditised and is seen to be gradually drifting away from just simple databases to information management systems, throwing up technological challenges.

Dr C. Mohan, an IBM Fellow, who has been working with IBM for nearly two decades, and considered a thought leader in database management, spoke to Business Line about where the industry is heading and some of the key challenges for researchers working to resolve issues to better manage database.

In India on a brief visit, Dr Mohan dreams of guiding Indian techies to the next level of innovation, helping them to develop and deliver new global products. Commoditisation of database means that the buyer does not care as to who the supplier is as long as the software delivers. It is just like buying a toothpaste, Dr Mohan says to illustrate the nature of the industry.

From here, as companies seek to gather information from anywhere, at any time, on a real-time basis, the focus has now shifted to information management systems.

"The transition from a mainframe-driven services to offering database management across platforms was carefully thought out by IBM. Given the range of offerings, IBM now needs to reach out faster and far better with the decision-makers and chief information officers and even average users," Dr Mohan said, explaining how IBM Research had pioneered database management which has been adopted by some enterprise vendors, such as Oracle.

In fact, Oracle does not have similar lab. It is said that managers are not criticised for cloning IBM.

The 9/11 attacks in the US actually shook up the corporate world calling for companies to develop disaster recovery and ways to deal with issues concurrently without having to bother about the back-end. In fact, the US Government announced certain stipulations for the industry players to follow to ensure uninterrupted work.

IBM products traditionally tend to back standards. Therefore, any research at IBM, which later leads to new products and services, is standards-driven. Some of the challenges faced include working on advanced concepts of supporting data and information retrieval through a querying system, where a lot of intelligence is built into, he said.

Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) is a key issue in database management. When enterprises want information without disruption and on demand, higher efficiencies are needed.

This is being addressed through self-configuring features that adapt by themselves and intuitively diagnose the problem and fix them. This makes the task of an IT manager a seamless experience, he said.

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