Today's applications require faster and more frequent access to data at the
mid-tier than ever before. This is due to a number of factors, including
massive growth of data volumes and the extreme processing requirements that
accompany such growth, the pressure from ever-changing business requirements,
and the adoption of architectural approaches and frameworks such as Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 and the resulting demands that these
frameworks make on data. The requirements of accessing and modifying this
data quickly using many different forms such as batch, OLTP, and online
access are stretching back-end data stores to the limit.
Much of this overload is caused by the classic mismatch between the object
and relational worlds and the massive overhead ... (more)