In this talk, we will discuss the essential features, similarities and differences between the perspectives of what will be 'the database of the future' and also discuss the impact of modern hardware on database architecture and data languages.

We are currently in a time that is considered the revolution of new databases. Cutting-edge data technologies span the gamut of NoSQL, key-value stores, map reduce, graph databases, NewSQL, streaming, in-memory, distributed, replicated, etc.

Massive amounts of data exists in structured form, unstructured and schema-less. Programming models increasingly use functional programming idioms and languages such as Clojure, Scala and F# inspired by Scheme, Haskell and O'Caml.

Data architectures are also a hot topic of discussion such as ACID vs BASE, immutable database, micro-services database per service, OLTP vs the Twitter Storm Lambda Architecture, Gartner HTAP or Forrester Translytical Database.

In the last decade years there have been significant improvements in processor cost, solid state storage, high performance clusters and cloud computing. The number of cores has increased significantly, but unfortunately without tools beyond map-reduce to really make them easily accessible.

As of yet, specialized hardware such as FPGAs and GPUS have just been used for niche applications, and also have challenging programming models. More recently, CPUs have added vector instructions, however tools and programming languages have been slow to exploit them. Small-memory gigabyte machines have rapidly expanded into terabyte machines. Most recently, with 3D NVM memory we are promised massive increases in persistent memory and reduced latency.

Attend this session to learn more about the future of databases!

Dave Thomas

Chief Scientist,
Kx Labs & Godfather of IBM Smalltalk & Eclipse

Dave Thomas is the Chief Scientist of Kx Labs and Co-Founder and former Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs (BRL), creators of the Ivy visual analytics workbench and ACM Distinguished Engineer. Dave is also Founder and former CEO of Object Technology International (OTI), eventually transitioning to CEO of IBM OTI Labs after its sale to IBM.

Dave is known for his contributions to Object Technology including IBM VisualAge and Eclipse IDEs, Smalltalk and Java virtual machines. Dave is a thought leader in large-scale software engineering and a founding director of the Agile Alliance.

With close links the R&D community, Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University in Canada and held past positions at UQ and QUT in Australia. He has been a business and technical advisor to many technology companies including Kx Systems. Dave is founder and chairman of the YOW! Australia and Lambda Jam conferences, and is a GOTO Conference Fellow.