“It is a company standard,” they say. “It is how we do things here. It is what we know and understand. Everyone else is using it, even for web publishing, so it must be the best choice.” The justifications are easy and safe sounding. Vendors who don’t want to have sales obstacles simply comply, and make their solutions run on Oracle. If the leading suppliers are also supporting the 25 year old technology, then why should anyone consider a “non-standard”, “unknown”, “risky” alternative? And why would any vendor in their right mind want to swim upstream against such customer resistance?

On the other hand, newspapers have an urgent need to adapt to the changes that are going on, that are driven by the internet. They can either make improvements to how they have always done business, and hope that is enough. Or they can adopt breakthrough solutions that will enable them to recast their own strengths and win against a whole new set of online competitors. While it makes sense that they should pick their technology for how it will give them a clear-cut advantage, Instead, many are saying they will only take a solution if it runs on their old but well-known technology. With that constraint, incremental improvements become their only choice.

DTI offers its new Liquid Media technology, to help newspapers bust out of their individual silos of news and ads, and start competing against the new online competitors who have no boundaries. Liquid Media can enable newspapers to compete in ways they can’t now. It offers them advantages that those who are tied to the old technology would have to spend a fortune to duplicate. Is hanging on to the old technology more important than surviving, much less thriving in a whole new world?

DTI took the risk of having to swim upstream against entrenched “standards” and having to sell “unknown” technology in order to bring our newspaper customers the competitive advantages they need to succeed in a rapidly changing environment. How can a significant competitive breakthrough happen that will enable a clear advantage if newspapers are tied to the same old 25 year old technology everyone else is using? At what point should the fear of adopting something new be subjugated to the fear of being left behind or left at a disadvantage?

While DTI is leading this change in the newspaper industry, there are signs all around that many others are discovering that a change in the traditional database foundation might make a big difference.

From eWeek magazine, August 6, 2006: “SAP may have stumbled onto an Oracle killer: in-memory technology that could, in theory, quash the need for a relational database in some cases.

eWEEK has learned that SAP has sussed out a way to organize its business intelligence data in columns versus tables, storing and indexing the data in memory and then running it all on blade servers.

The result is faster queries than would be possible by tapping data stored in a data warehouse or relational database. And with the cost of memory plummeting over the past few years, SAP executives say the Walldorf, Germany, company's in-memory technology is a much cheaper data storage alternative to traditional databases—for its BI customers, that is.

But eWEEK has also learned that SAP is working on in-memory data management capabilities that could go beyond BI to other areas of the application stack, replacing the need for a relational database in new software installations.

With about 55 percent of SAP implementations sitting on Oracle databases, there's a potential for disruption. That said, the potential of in-memory technology isn't lost on Oracle. Oracle bought in-memory database provider TimesTen last year.

"What we are seeing with text search and Google... [is] showing us the way of using main memory for organizing text data," said Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect. "We've all used main memory in the past. Now, in the case of analytics or unstructured search, it's become flexible enough to do application-specific data management."

SAP put its technology on IBM and Hewlett-Packard servers to speed up, by orders of magnitude, querying capabilities. It put the boxes out in the field at some big companies with pretty large data warehousing needs: Coca-Cola, Whirlpool, British Petroleum and Novartis. The results, according to Agassi, were astonishing: a 90 percent increase in reporting performance, with queries cut from 60 seconds down to 3 seconds in the case of Coca-Cola.

"We knew in the lab this was beyond cool, but we didn't know how much impact there would be on the day-to-day life of users of data warehouses," said [Shai] Agassi, [SAP's head of software development]."

Note that DTI’s Liquid Media solution is based partly on in-memory database technology.

There are more emerging acknowledgements that a new type of database is needed to meet the current challenges. From the Java Developer’s Journal, August 2006, page 40, you can read, “The traditional relational database that’s built for storing data efficiently and guaranteeing consistency won’t be able to cope with this demand. Relational databases are passive, executing queries on sitting data only. Today’s complex applications, however, require a system that can very efficiently execute queries as data streams in.”

DTI’s Liquid Media is designed to support complex content management architectures which deal with rapidly changing and continuously updating information – the very kind of information that is the life blood of newspapers. In fact it is designed to bring the information from multiple systems together, enabling both editorial and advertising information to come from anywhere, not just one newspaper’s own database, and flow to readers and consumers wherever they need and want it to be.

DTI’s Liquid Media can actually interface with current relational databases, such as Oracle, and help newspapers begin to reach beyond the known limitations of their current silos of information. Newspapers do not need to make a drastic overnight change. They simply need to be willing to consider new and better ways of handling their vital information, if they expect to get new and better solutions. The breakthrough solutions newspapers need, can be implemented in phases. But that will require letting some breakthrough dataflow technology in the door, to run alongside their traditional relational databases. As it proves itself, taking the next steps will begin to seem vital. For most IT people, once they actually experience the new technology, they become advocates. It is those who refuse to consider change, citing company policy, company standards, sunk investment, current know-how of the staff, and all other reasons except the actual technology breakthroughs themselves, who will prevent their companies from getting the very solutions they will need to survive.

What sets DTI apart is our willingness to break from tradition, and adopt and develop the breakthroughs that newspapers need, even if it isn’t popular. Liquid Media is that breakthrough. It required new database technology to be able to make a big enough difference in how newspapers manage their information to really gain the advantage they need. Anything less than a breakthrough technology isn’t good enough in this current environment of rapid change, driven by the Internet. Newspapers have an urgent need for Liquid Media.