Databases have always been clunky bits of software. Often, they don’t find what you are looking for. At other times they produce the wrong result.

They are also leaky and easy to hack. Perhaps their worst feature, though, is that they are expensive to purchase and even more so to develop to a business’s needs.

Hope is at hand, however. It seems databases on hard drives are on the way out, to be replaced by “cloud computing.”

Read John Evans’s article, The Great Database Crisis 2008, over at Syntagma. Here’s an excerpt:

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.