Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Although database management system (DBMS) technology is very mature, there is a potential for much future innovation in integrating structured and unstructured data, virtualizing access to data, and simplifying data management through greater automation and intelligence. Forrester estimates that more than 90% of all business data in enterprises is unstructured, but only 5% of unstructured data is stored in databases. This creates a huge opportunity to integrate different types of data and content — structured, unstructured, and semistructured — for enhanced information sharing and control. We expect that DBMS will address this challenge by supporting all kinds of data and content in its native form with much tighter integration, while sustaining high performance. In the next four years, DBMS technology and middleware will also evolve to support information fabric, virtualizing access to heterogeneous data. Both of these trends will combine to offer an evolutionary path to a future world of information management in which all forms of information will be much easier to access, integrate, and control, and this will all come at a lower cost, due to increased automation.