IDG Contributor Network: Counting database costs: inflexible databases are unaffordable databases

“Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death.” —Virginia Woolf
In the previous post we talked about the mega-trend towards elasticity in the enterprise software stack, and how the database layer is not keeping pace with developments in the web, application and storage layers. We also asserted that this limits business agility and constrains innovation. Most importantly we referred to the serious cost implications of an inflexible database layer. In this