The Future of Data

Martin Fowler writes...

If applications were more aware of version control then I think we would see more interesting things being done with it. I hope that a solid, usable, open source tool will spread the usage of version control to a wider audience - after all we are no longer short of disk space.

I have to agree, and think Subversion's support for WebDAV and API could help get there. Thinking back about a year, where I speculate...

From working on systems in a half dozen domains I have come to the conclusion there are three simple patterns we should lean on for making documents and messages persistent.

• Tuples Spaces (think Ruple Forums) for in-progress, state machine-like transactions and collaboration.
• Versioned document trees (think Subversion's file system) for long-lived, shared, document editing.
• Star Schema-based storage (think Sybase IQ, a simple, low-maintenance, scalable database technology) for read-only transaction history and analysis.

I deeply believe (it is my hypothesis) that these are the only patterns you need, and the implementations going forward can become far simpler and adaptable than all of today's cruft.