PLM and Data Management in the 21st Century

Boston is one of the rare places where you meet many CAD and PLM people at the same time at the same place. You don’t need to guess a lot why so. MIT CAD Lab, as well as many companies in this domain, made Greater Boston a unique place for talents in CAD and PLM space.

Tech Soft 3D is well known technological outfit helping many companies in CAD and PLM domain to develop successful products. Besides that Tech Soft 3D is sponsoring a gathering of technological fellows in the CAD/PLM domain to come, network, and share their experience – Tech Talk. Yesterday was my first time attending Tech Talk in downtown Boston. I missed one last year because of a crazy travel schedule. This year I’ve been honored to get invited and make a short speech. I shared my experience and thoughts about database and data management technological trends. As part of my presentation, I shared my thoughts about the so-called NoSQL trend, what it contains, and how it can be useful for CAD, PDM/PLM. Below you can see a full slide deck of my presentation.

On the following slide, you can see a simplified decision table that can help you to designate what NoSQL databases can be useful for different types of solutions.

What is my conclusion? Database and data management technology are going through a Cambrian explosion of different options and flavors. It is a result of a massive amount of development coming from open source, web, and other places. The database is moving from “solution” into “toolbox” status. A single database (mostly RDBMS) is no longer a straightforward decision for all your development tasks. My hunch, CAD/PLM developers need to ramp up with tools and knowledge to tackle with future database decisions. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups, and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.