The Right Tool for the Job
As the old proverb goes “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Which put another way, it is best to use the right tool for the task at hand. While a bicycle may do well to transport you across town, it is probably not the easiest way to cross the country. A lawnmower may do an excellent job trimming your lawn but you probably don’t want to cut your hair with it.
Rahul Bhargava, evolphin Software CTO, recently wrote an extensive paper on why traditional RDBMS database technology is not the proper tool for managing digital assets. While it may do a wonderful job managing structure data, it is not well suited to managing digital assets. Structured data is data that is typically represented by fields, rows and columns, with good examples being an employee’s record containing their name, address and social security number. Unstructured data, on the other hand, is data that does not follow any such patter; a good example is an audio recording or video file.
Digital Asset Management software solutions have been around for a couple of decades and most, if not all, were written with traditional RDBMS databases as their backend. These databases are not scalable and do not provide the level of data consistency that is necessary to manage your digital assets. You can get a free copy of Rahul’s paper here www.evolphin.com/resources/.
Or if you wish, you can send us a self-addressed, stamped envelope and we would be glad to mail you a copy.