Bangalore: Understanding the meaning of database is crucial for all those who work with large amounts of information all at once. Databases are combination of many things and most importantly they are critical, costly and complex and the never ending saga of love- hate relationship of IT’s with them.

In recent times it’s been observed that databases are being tagged under the dissatisfactory category. A survey conducted by InformationWeek ‘State of Database Technology’ which had 760 respondents and all of the respondents are involved in database strategies with their respective companies.  The opinion they expressed was that the vendors need to provide more efficient services by helping the company address issues related to data and deal with problems which includes large data volume, more –fluid data relationships, and in some cases, barely contained chaos as per an article by Joseph P. Raiti Jr. and David S. Read in Information Week.

The problem however here is that the data structures that are being used are outdated that have served us for more that four decades efficiently are now showing their age. Lately the changes in the way our businesses use data or information and the huge amount of data we manage have resulted in new hosting and data structuring options for example semantic data stores, NoSQL and hosted warehouse environs. The study of the survey shows that while some of these new hosting and structuring options have gained popularity the others failed miserably and could not attract users hence remain ignored. At times with services like cloud there is enough base for being cautious. But in other cases, especially using the low cost relational DBMS (Database Management Systems) in the first place and then moving on to hardware commodity, the skeptics are passing on technology that could manage to slash costs and yet increase satisfaction.

As of now cost is the biggest issue and a reason of dissatisfaction. Only 11 percent are satisfied with amount they are spending on their databases while most of IT employees still disapprove of the cost and consider the licensing based on CPUs, cores, and the gold-standard relational database a huge stress baggage.