Yesterday, at dinner, I was spinning thoughts with Josh Berkus, lead of PostgreSQL, about how the database industry will look like in 10 years. We agreed that SMB, embedded and SaaS (for database services, too!) will be the growth areas whereas traditional enterprise databases will be rather stagnant.
One thought we raised was the effect of the underlying paradigm of the "information age" (at the core of books like "The World is Flat" and "The Future of Work"), namely, that communication is going to be entirely free - no bandwidth limitations, unlimited connectivity etc.: If I am always online do I (still) need (local) persistence or just a big central data store?
Josh was doubting that communication will ever be entirely free, at least not in 10 years time. He pointed out that 40% of the US was still on dial-up. Today, though, I
read in the NYT, that not only my hometown SF and Google-town Mountain View will have free wireless Internet within 12 months, but also the entire Silicon Valley, realized in a new project called the "Silicon Valley Metro Connect", run by IBM and Cisco. So I am more inclined to think the impossible and imagine a world where bandwidth and communication in data, voice, and pictures is entirely unlimited and free.
Now, will this make (distributed) databases oblivious?
I think the opposite is the case: The more networked a system is, the more you tend to push out rather than centralize. If you can connect to every person/device at any time, you do not need to store it centrally any more, but can store data right at its origin.
In fact, it always makes sense to have more granular data closer to the origin (e.g. a robot needs all its kinetic information right at the device), while more aggregated data is needed in distinct locations (e.g. the information how many cars the robot has assembled per hours and what parts it used, may be stored in the ERP system of headquarters, around the globe).
It's like the news: I have a much more granular data level for local news (East Bay bridge closure this weekend) than for international news (New $10BN airport opened in Bangkok). If I was reading up about every bridge closure in the world, I would simply be swamped with unnecessary information.