March 25, 2008
Earlier this week, I saw this New York Times article about the surprising (to some) longevity of the mainframe, a technology declared dead in the early 90s yet which continues to have a healthy and robust life. Some have said the very declaration was a plant on the part of PC makers and champions. I made light of the mainframe’s undead status last year (and readers played along by declaring it their favorite undead technology.
In any case, declaring things dead seems to be a favorite technique of journalists and bloggers. Remember last year when relational database pioneer Michael Stonebraker declared that the RDBMS was a concept whose time had come and gone? (A post that promoted, instead the approach taken by the company Stonebraker was working for, as at least one blogger noted at the time.
Just today, on this very site, I read that DB2 is dead. Should you worry? Put it this way, if it's as dead as the mainframe, I guess that means it's alive and doing well, thank you very much. Our friend and contributing writer Scott Hayes, the well-known DB2 performance expert who wrote the post, pointed to the decision to rename this site (and companion publication) as evidence to back his claim. Having been involved in all the discussions about and the implementation of the change, I have to respectfully disagree.
Look at the content and you'll see no decline in DB2 coverage since the name change. Yes, the magazine and this Web site covers Informix and other technologies that now fall under the Information On Demand rubric. But that's been true since 2005 (in the case of Informix) and at least since I started working on DB2 Magazine in 1998 in the case of related technologies (take a spin through the archives if you’re curious).
It's a heterogeneous world. Databases don’t exist in a vacuum—they have to work with a host of related technologies to bring value to the business. IBM offers lots of data management and information management products. The magazine's new name reflects our ongoing coverage of these technologies. The DB2 coverage is still there. So is the Informix coverage. So is coverage of technologies that work with both.
It’s provocative to declare things dead. And, yes, it can grab more eyes on the Internet than a more nuanced approach (as pointed out in this interesting article on how the Internet is shaping news coverage). But aren’t we all hip to this approach by now? Perhaps it’s time for someone to ring the death knell on this overused technique and proclaim the practice of declaring things dead to be, well, dead.
In the meantime, I welcome your questions, thoughts and comments about our coverage, undead technologies, and whatever data management topics are on your mind.
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