December 12, 2012

Some trends that will continue in 2013

I’m usually annoyed by lists of year-end predictions. Still, a reporter asked me for some, and I found one kind I was comfortable making.

Trends that I think will continue in 2013 include:

Growing attention to machine-generated data. Human-generated data grows at the rate business activity does, plus 0-25%. Machine-generated data grows at the rate of Moore’s Law, also plus 0-25%, which is a much higher total. In particular, the use of remote machine-generated data is becoming increasingly real.

Hadoop adoption. Everybody has the big bit bucket use case, largely because of machine-generated data. Even today’s technology is plenty good enough for that purpose, and hence justifies initial Hadoop adoption. Development of further Hadoop technology, which I post about frequently, is rapid. And so the Hadoop trend is very real.

Application SaaS. The on-premises application software industry has hopeless problems with product complexity and rigidity. Any suite new enough to cut the Gordian Knot is or will be SaaS (Software as a Service).

Newer BI interfaces. Advanced visualization — e.g. Tableau or QlikView — and mobile BI are both hot. So, more speculatively, are “social” BI (Business Intelligence) interfaces.

Price discounts. If you buy software at 50% of list price, you’re probably doing it wrong. Even 25% can be too high.

MySQL alternatives.  NoSQL and NewSQL products often are developed as MySQL alternatives. Oracle has actually done a good job on MySQL technology, but now its business practices are scaring companies away from MySQL commitments, and newer short-request SQL DBMS are ready for use.

Meanwhile, I need to get up to speed both on PostgreSQL and MariaDB.

Dynamic schemas. Between NoSQL and Hadoop, there’s momentum for dynamic schemas. The traditional model of coupling data structures loosely to applications — but tightly to each other — is increasingly reversed. With the ability to put tabular query-oriented views over almost anything, this doesn’t have the same drawbacks now it had in the pre-relational era.

Privacy invasion. Businesses make heavy use of data about individuals, but usually don’t have great power to hurt them. Free-world governments, which have enormous power to hurt, are so far largely restraining themselves (unless you’re an Islamic villager). But both groups keep amassing huge amounts of personal information and insight.

“Big data” hype. The industry’s most over-used buzzword, big data, will continue to plague us all year. I’ve seen the phrase used 4 or more times in a single pitch email. Indeed, that happened twice last week, triggering the first item in Sunday’s marcom tips post.

Comments

3 Responses to “Some trends that will continue in 2013”

  1. Theron on December 13th, 2012 11:25 am

    Can you provide any illumination on the specific “business practices are scaring companies away from MySQL commitments”?

  2. Curt Monash on December 13th, 2012 2:20 pm

    It’s widely reported that Oracle is withholding test cases for MySQL.

    Less widely reported, MySQL engine companies cannot prudently assume Oracle will be a benign partner.

    And lots of people just generally dislike Oracle pricing and sales attitudes, even ahead of any specific bad acts Oracle might do to specifically to them, specifically in the area of MySQL.

  3. John Held on December 18th, 2012 10:42 am

    Fascinating and thought-provoking points on 2013 trends.

    On Hadoop adoption, very interesting things going on at Sears/Metascale IMHO; Hadoop replacing traditional ETL and RDMBS for ‘traditional’ structured database/reporting and customer analysis, including 10Q reporting.

    I love your occasional coverage of what practitioner organizations are doing and it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what Phil Shelley is attempting at Sears.

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