Emerging Technologies
Database technologies do not exist in isolation: Database architectures are heavily influenced both by the evolution of software applications, and by advances in computing hardware and operating system design. In this column we’ll keep track of the major emerging technologies that influence the software and hardware landscape and on the databases of the future.
There's a wide and growing acceptance that containers are replacing operating systems as the deployment target for application components. While application modules were previously designed to be installed upon a specific version of an operating system on a particular hardware platform, they are now increasingly being designed to run within a virtualized representation of an operating system—most frequently within a Docker container.
Posted April 07, 2017
Imagine you are standing by a railway track near a lever that switches between two sets of tracks. A runaway rail trolley is heading toward the fork in the tracks, and five people are trapped on the currently activated line. You could switch the trolley to the alternative track, but there is a single person trapped there as well. Do you switch the trolley? The artificial intelligence community is increasingly wrestling with similar moral conundrums implicit in the ever-more pervasive algorithms that underlie much of our technological infrastructure.
Posted February 08, 2017