Moving Relational Database Management Systems Out of Their Comfort Zone
Jeff Naughton
University of Wisconsin

Recently there has been growing speculation that relational database
management systems are mature artifacts and that there is little of
fundamental interest to be done in their future development. In this
talk I will argue that this opinion is mistaken. In particular, whenever
one tries to apply database technology to applications outside of
the traditional comfort zone for RDBMS, one is immediately faced with a
plethora of interesting and relevant challenges. I will illustrate this
with two examples. The first applies relational technology to
cluster management, while the second addresses the "pipe dream" of
using relational database technology to provide structured queries over
unstructured data sets.  My hope is that this talk will be of interest
to hard-core DBMS researchers as well as those who still think database
management systems are "the boring part of accounting."