ERP, Financials and Large Databases
It seems like Workday is getting quite a bit of press about their vision for flexible, hosted (ala the Adam Bosworth funded Salesforce.com) ERP software. Looks like Xero might have a fight on it’s hands with SAP and Oracle both trying to enter the hosted mid size business market.
Whats interesting to me about all this is the description of Workdays application architecture:
Workday runs on an in-memory database [...] it uses a relational database (mySQL) only for persistence [...]. This persistent database has exactly three tables, one for data, one for metadata, and one for instructions. Yes, that’s right. All data–the employees, the positions, the organizational structure, and even the layout of a screen–is stored in the same table. - From: Workday: Forget ERP, start over
I wonder how this compares to Xero’s architecture. Knowing Craig Walker - I’d be surprised to here there wasn’t at least some meta-modelling in Xero.
It seems like the traditional relational/OLTP approach of having strictly defined, highly normalised schemas which you hydrate/dehydrate into runtime objects is losing currency. Pat Helland - Jim Gray’s protege - is back at Microsoft and preaching heresy about traditional views around OLTP. Here’s some of his recent stuff that’s got me thinking:
- Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion
- Accountants Don’t Use Erasers
- Normalization Is for Sissies
It seems like the more I think about this - the more this seems like the future. Here’s some other stuff I’ve read recently along similar lines:
- One Size Fits All: An Idea whose Time has Come and Gone
- Joe Gregorio’s Mega data post
- Scaling from 0 to 40 hits per second in 3 days
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