Practitioners often fail to apply textbook database design principles. We observe both a perversion of the relational model and a growth of less formal alternatives. Overall, there is an opposition between the analytic thought that prevailed when many data modeling techniques were initiated, and the pragmatism which now dominates among practitioners. There are at least two recent trends supporting this rejection of traditional models: (1) the rise of the sophisticated user, most notably in social media is challenge to the rationalist view, as it blurs the distinction between design and operation, (2) in the new technological landscape where there are billions of interconnected computers worldwide, simple concepts like consistency sometimes become prohibitively expensive. Overall, for a wide range of information systems, design and operation are becoming integrated in the spirit of pragmatism. Thus, we are left with design methodologies which embrace fast and continual iterations and and exploratory testing. These methodologies allow innovation without permission in that the right to design new features is no longer so closely guarded. Fo

1. Innovation without
permission
Daniel Lemire
http://lemire.me http://twitter.com/lemire
Thanks to: A. Badia, Louisville University and
J. Robillard from UQAM

3. - 2000 employees
- 600 million users*
* As of January 2011
Agarwal, A. (2009). Facebook: Science and the Social Graph. QCon 2008.

4. - No schema : key-value stores
- No join
- Engineers have direct access to data
* As of January 2011
Agarwal, A. (2009). Facebook: Science and the Social Graph. QCon 2008.

5. ~0%
Image source: dullhunk
(flickr)

6. ~10 000 Information Systems
~90% Relational
100-200 Tables/database
50-200 Attributes/table
Source: Brodie & Liu, The Power and Limits of Relational Technology in the Age of
Information Ecosystems, On The Move Federated Conferences, 2010.

7. Post-Methodology Era:
late 1990s
D. E. Avison and G. Fitzgerald, Where now for development methodologies? 2003.

8. Sophisticated users
Image source: Dave77459
(flickr)
Billions of computers
Image source: ivanx
(flickr)

9. Users are considered as mere
faceless objects for who the
systems are designed.
J. Iivari, H. Isomäki, S. Pekkola, The user – the great unknown of systems development:
reasons, forms, challenges, experiences and intellectual contributions of user involvement,
Information Systems Journal, 2010.

10. 93% of accounts are never used
Source: Meredith and O'Donnell, A Functional Model of Social Media and its Application
to Business Intelligence, DSS '10, 2010.

11. n !ot
s are never used
a ted
w ul
I s
93% of accounts
c o n
Source: Meredith and O'Donnell, A Functional Model of Social Media and its Application
to Business Intelligence, DSS '10, 2010.

13. Deployment: test for user reactions
* As of January 2011
Agarwal, A. (2009). Facebook: Science and the Social Graph. QCon 2008.

14. - Google had more than
1 million servers* in
2007
* according to Gartner

16. Brewer’s theorem (CAP)
Consistency Availability
XN
B MS oS
QL
RD
Tolerance
Gilbert, S. and Lynch, N., Brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of
consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services. 2002

17. NoSQL

18. - Corruption in Oracle database
- Up to 16.5 million customers affected
- $132 million frozen
- thousands of loan applications lost
- Over-engineered database: strong
consistency throughout
Online: Chris Mellor, Morgan Chase blames Oracle for online bank crash ,
Curt Monash, Details of the JPMorgan Chase Oracle database outage

19. Does your
methodology
know about:
- Co-design with users?
- Highly distributed data?