by Angela Guess
Scientists exploring the effects of global warming on the North and South Poles have discovered that a purely relational database can’t cut it: “Gallaher started with Greenland’s roughly 660,000-square-mile ice sheet. As it turned out, probing 30 years of Big Data on Greenland — a task that includes thrice-daily satellite sweeps that produce an almost petabyte-scale amount of data — is better suited to a technology that has been overlooked in this heyday of conventional relational databases. That technology is an object-oriented database management system that addresses data as objects — in this case, an object database engine from Versant Corp.”
The article continues, “The data is so vast that NSIDC (and NASA, its collecting partner) held only the metadata in a relational database. The data itself was stored in directory trees, and had to be extracted before researchers could ask the critical what, where and when questions — let alone analyze the why. Given the size of the files, a researcher asking, for example, about the reflectivity, or reflective properties, of the ice — how white or how dark it is, and how much or how fast that feature is changing — might have to spend many weeks just to get the data. (Properties is the term used by the object-oriented community for persistent data.)”
