Beyond relational databases: a solution to data fragmentation

Data and analytical fragmentation have been risk management obstacles for decades, but efforts to overcome the problem have been rooted within the paradigm of relational databases. David Rowe argues moving beyond this framework holds the key to success

The past 30 years have seen two major shifts in the prevailing technology paradigm. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, client-server applications became the accepted state-of-the-art. These combined the benefits of shared central resources – typical of the older mainframe world – with the local computing resources of increasingly powerful desktop machines. Typical applications involved a ‘fat client’ with a server database. Most of the analytical heavy lifting took place on the client, while the