Data Routing Rather than Databases: The Meaning of the Next Wave of
the Web Revolution to Data Management

What is going to be as important in the next 20 years as relational
databases were in the prior 20 years is the management of
self-describing extensible messages. The net is undergoing a profound
change as it moves from an entirely pull-oriented model into a push
model. This latter model is far more biological in nature with an
increasing amount of information flowing asynchronously through the
system to form an InformationBus. The key challenges for the next 20
years will be storing, routing, querying, filtering, managing, and
interacting with this bus in a manner that doesn't lead to total
systems degradation.  Predictive intelligent filtering and rules
engines will become more important than querying.

Driving factors for this revolution will be the need for push for
portable devices due to their poor latency and intermittent
communication, an increasing demand for timely information on fully
connected devices, a huge rise in application to application
integration through asynchronous messaging based on web services and a
concomitant requirement for an entirely new type of message broker,
and an increasing desire for intelligent agents to cope with
information overload as all information becomes available all the
time. The key enabling technology will be XML messages and the various
technologies that will develop for handling XML ranging from
transformation to compression to indexing to storage to programming
languages.