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Future of Database (cont)

Limitations/pitfalls of classical RDBMSs:
  • NULL is ambiguous: unknown, not applicable, not supplied
  • "limited" support for constraints/integrity and rules
  • no support for uncertainty (data represents the state-of-the-world)
  • data model too simple (e.g. no direct support for complex objects)
  • query model too rigid (e.g. no approximate matching)
  • continually changing data sources not well-handled
  • data must be "molded" to fit a single rigid schema
  • database systems must be manually "tuned"
  • do not scale well to some data sets (e.g. Google, Telco's)