Top five data challenges for the next decade

Summary form only given. For the past three decades, those of us in the database field have principally focused attention and significant effort on technology for storing, querying, accessing, and securing data with well-known structure in high-performance data management systems. Our focus has been riveted on performance, performance, and performance. The world has changed dramatically since the early days of database management systems, however. The dynamics of DBMS have changed, moving from supporting back office systems, to front offices, to Web-based systems. Computer architecture has changed, as we have moved from systems where 256 K was a large size memory, disk drives were very expensive, most processors were water-cooled, and screens glowed with green characters. Not only has more data been produced in the last several years than in all previous history, but also more and more of it is in digital form. Accelerated pace and higher expectations driven by competitive necessity have changed the nature of database solutions from well-understood batch-oriented processing to real-time, ad hoc query on continuously streaming data. All these changes are coming together to create a new set of challenges for the decade ahead. The author discusses the top five of these challenges in the database area.