Data Management in Cloud Computing

To some, cloud computing seems to be little more than a marketing umbrella, encompassing topics such as distributed computing, grid computing, utility computing, and software-as-a-service, that have already received significant research focus and commercial implementation. Nonetheless, there exist an increasing number of large companies that are offering cloud computing infrastructure products and services that do not entirely resemble the visions of these individual component topics. In this paper, the limitations and opportunities of deploying data management issues on the emerging cloud computing platforms are discussed. It is speculated that large scale data analysis tasks, decision support systems, and application specific data marts are more likely to take advantage of cloud computing platforms than operational, transactional database systems. A list of features that a DBMS designed for large scale data analysis tasks running on cloud computing platforms should contain is presented. Some currently available open source and commercial database options that can be used to perform such analysis tasks are discussed, and it is concluded that none of these options, as presently architected, match the requisite features. The need for a new DBMS, designed specifically for cloud computing environments is also discussed in this paper.