7 December 2011

For the last 40 years, the way that large-scale services, such as global banks, and scientific experiments, such as the LHC at CERN, have been managing their data has been reminiscent of Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:there's only one tried-and-tested path, a 'yellow brick road', and it's relational databases. But over the last couple of years, some new, non-relational database models have emerged and may represent the next step in the evolution of data management.