I’ve been kind of floating around this topic for a while… Well databases in general… And I see a lot of people who have rather high standards (which is not a bad thing.)  I imagine the complication of offering a service like this comes from the fact that database people have very stringent standards.

Things like ACID transactions, Foreign keys, Table/Row/Column/Field read/write locking, always come up in these types of conversations.  I suppose that this is so because it’s been the standard for so long… It’s just how people *think* about databases… Which means that its what databases should be, right? Right?

Well not long ago the people at Amazon rethought process communication, and rethought storage, and then rethought servers.  Perhaps its about time they rethought the database as well.  I have a hunch (as others have noted here before) that they already are!

I really think that a lot, and I mean a LOT, could be done with a very simple model.

1. Tables are their own island (no foreign keys)
2. simple auto Incrementing PK’s
3. every column indexed
4. only simple operators supported ( =, >, < , !=, is null, is not null )

Heresy! Ack! Foo! Bar! NO! THATS NOT A REAL DATABASE.  Well, no, not as you mean by “real database” but it certainly is a database.  And I expect it would be good enough for 85% of peoples wants, needs, and desires.

We’ve learned that delays in storage give us permanence.  We’ve learned that the pipeline is a good (and global) thing, and we’ve learned that impermanence gives us expandability.  Necessity being the mother of invention I expect that something like this will be out soon, and I expect that people will learn to be perfectly happy with it.  It’s all about flexibility and agility here people!
It’ll come, people will complain, it’ll work, and as time goes on, I think it’ll get better and better.