Review for ““One Size Fits All”: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone”

The last 25 years DBMS is trying to design a one size fits all system. Basically, traditional database has been used for varied application types. And the authors argue that the "one size fits all" DBMS would be a failure. In fact the one size fits all illusion is because of the same user interface. Indeed, they run multiple system on the background.

Nowadays domain specific engine can beat RDBMS by 10x (e.g. Data warehouse, text search, stream processing, scientific data). For example, for the performance discussion, the in-bound data processing is increasingly take place of out-bound data storage. Therefore , the stream processing engines extend the SQL data processing system, which is used for conventional DBMS.

The main idea of this paper is to illustrate several domain specific engine that can outperform than the "one size fits all" DBMS.

The trade-off here is whether you should use a general system which supply more data type while sacrificing the performance, or using domain specific engine which has faster performance but the application type is narrowing down.

I think it will be influential in the future, since the debate between whether using domain specific engine or general engine is always a topic in database area.