top | item 11604527

Ask HN: Research into stateless RDBMS

3 points| jayshua | 10 years ago

I've been wondering if there has been any research into stateless RDBMS. To clarify: the schema of a relational database is very state oriented. You create your tables, and then alter them over time with your data. Every attempt to turn this into a stateless system that I've come across has suffered from the problem of data loss. A static file describing the "current state" of the database schema (this table has these columns, etc.) does not allow the system to know whether a particular column was renamed, or one column deleted and another added. Anyone know of any research into this question?

2 comments

[+] adpfr|10 years ago|reply

The research areas of "temporal databases" [1] and "temporal data warehouses" [2] deal with temporal validity of data as well as with evolution of schemata over time. The goal is usually to reconstruct historical states, so I'm not quite sure if this exactly fits what you mean by statelessness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=temporal+data+war...

[+] borplk|10 years ago|reply

I don't know much about it however do look into Apache Samza.