"IBM is working closely with a lot of solution providers who design and implement business critical solutions in areas like retail, finance, banking and manufacturing"

Different IT organizations have long been faced with the challenge of
providing fast response times for applications that use databases and that is
what global database majors like IBM are doing. And this is Dr C Mohan, Fellow
of IBM's specialty. Having joined IBM Almaden Research Center in 1981, he is
currently a steering committee member of the company's Software Group
Architecture Board and a member of IBM's Information Management Architecture
Board. He is also working on database caching, clustered databases and next
generation messaging in the context of DB2 and WebSphere. He talks about the way
databases have transformed and what is in store for the industry as far as near
future is concerned.

Dr C Mohan Fellow of IBM

Databases have always been on an evolving path. What are
the prominent changes that have happened with databases over the years?

Earlier, the performance of databases was a bigger issue than the ease of
use. Now a lot of focus is being given to the overall ease of use of complex
databases. In the meantime, a lot of query optimization work has also happened.
Referential integration got introduced as a concept and people started to do
more with their systems. They wanted to model richer data with it including XMl
extender, text extender, audio video, XML and text.

Now we see that larger amount of data is being processed.
Information and the integration of information is becoming much more important,
because it is the way companies are going to be able to gain insight into their
own operations, their customers and their competitors.

The key is to enable a company to take its data, systems and
resources and create a platform that allows them all to integrate everything
together. We are working towards enhanced manageability of database deployments
where workloads are shifted in response to application demands.

We are also trying to address issues like how to effectively
handle query for large amount of data? It is an expensive process if we go
through all the data. So we have to use sampling techniques and that is very
important from a business point of view. Here the overall objective is to make
it as simple as possible.

How important are solution providers for IBM? What is IBM's
strategy to continuously engage the solution provider or systems integrator
community?

We are now more focused on solutions and solution providers than ever
before. They are an integral part of our ecosystem. Today, IBM is working
closely with a lot of solution providers who design and implement business
critical solutions in areas like retail, finance, banking and manufacturing.

IBM, as a company, consciously made a decision to play an
important role in the middleware arena and hence the global community of
solution providers and system integrators becomes very important to us. We
always try our best to engage with this community towards introducing cutting
edge technologies to their customers or helping them move up the value chain.

Since we are a middleware organization, most of our efforts
go towards developing and assisting the overall ecosystem that we deal in. This
involves working closely with the solution provider community in terms of
providing all the assistance that they need in the form of technology training
and deployments as well.

What is the focus of IBM's operations in India when it
comes to databases?

India is one of the fastest growing geographies for us and it is a very
important market for us as well. IBM is always working towards embedding
intelligence within the databases. Language is one area where we are doing some
projects at our research laboratory in New Delhi.

China is another very important location for a company like
IBM. But certain problems are unique to these places. For instance, language is
a bigger problem in the Indian context. So we are working towards addressing
this issue in different ways. Within our India research laboratory we are
working with Hindi recognition software.

Even though, there are a number of solutions available in the
market today, they are not good for the Indian conditions and language. We are
trying to develop excellence when it comes to providing true Hindi recognition.

What kind of cutting edge technologies are going to rule
the world of databases in the near future?

Now we see a lot of integration between relational and text data. Today, we
are moving towards an era of intelligent databases. More and more databases are
moving towards self-management.

This is what going to provide more opportunity in this field.
As we move forward, less and less number of people would be needed to maintain
large databases. The idea is to develop databases that can take care of
themselves with the least amount of human intervention.

The idea is to have less number of people in managing these
databases. This concept involves ideas like adaptive query processing and trying
to compare situations with some pre-defined parameters. For solution providers
and system integrators it means managing complex databases with less number of
people. We are trying our best to come out with intelligent databases that won't
require highly skilled manpower to handle its operations.

We have also made a lot of progress in terms of inspecting
the databases from time to time. We have a health monitor — which tries to
police the database. So this way an answer to a query can be done in an
intelligent fashion, consuming less amount of time which is most important for

enterprises running mission critical applications.

ZIA ASKARI