Are you familiar with 1% internet rule? It is also called 90-9-1 principle. According to this rule, only 1% of internet users are actively involved into content creation. Even 1% percent rule cannot be applied as-is to enterprise, my hunch retrieval of data (or data access) becomes more and more important these days. The amount of data in enterprise organizations is growing. To get access to this data is a critical IT requirement.
Companies are thinking about different ways to access data. It comes in a form of search, reports, analysis and many others. All I said above, applies to manufacturing companies and PLM systems. Traditionally, engineering uses, which represents a majority of CAD/PLM users from the beginning are very concerned about data creation – CAD design, Simulation, Drawings – all these elements assumes creation of information. However, when it comes to user adoption, the problem of data consumption comes to the place.
While the question of noSQL database adoption by PLM is still open, my guess the majority of PLM implementation in the world are running on top of RDBMS and probably with heavy presence of Oracle databases. On this note, Oracle recently updated its database to include XQuery Full Text Search. The following article in AMS Tech blog provides lots of useful information about this full text search query functionality and code examples.
What is my conclusion? New technologies like noSQL and others are cool. However, while you have to support many existing customers in production, usage of existing mainstream database technologies can become an interesting option. I’m not sure it will be become a life saver for Oracle databases in the race against other databases options. Nevertheless, to solve customers problems is a priority. Full text query can provide some cool search capabilities to existing implementations. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
