Gartner's Death of the Database: RFID, Real-Time Systems, and the Future of Data Management

Dave Kellogg critiques Gartner analysts Mark Beyer and Donald Feinberg's controversial claim that databases will become obsolete in an RFID-enabled world. While acknowledging merit in their argument about real-time physical object tracking, Kellogg argues the death of databases is overstated and represents instead a shift from databases to data warehouses, alongside growing importance of unstructured data and XQuery over SQL.