This Saturday I’m impelled by an urge to write about something less gloomy than the world financial meltdown. So I’ve chosen:

The death of the database.

Bear with me, it’s not as dark as it sounds, and is much more interesting than it seems. In fact, if you’ve ever struggled with a database, like Microsoft’s Access, you may be forgiven for throwing your hat in the air.

First principles first. When we begin playing around with computers, we become aware there are two types of memory — the stuff that disappears when the computer is turned off, or during a power cut, this is Random Access Memory (RAM); and secondly, the hard drive onto which we save our work to preserve it when the computer is shut down.

We learn to be wary of RAM because most of us will have lost chunks of work when something goes wrong. We place much more faith in the hard drive, even though they can go pop too.

Hard drives are run by databases — a form of software that organizes data so that it can be retrieved from a number of different angles. Databases are the worker bees of almost every software application. They purr away in the background while we type — paging, fetching and carrying all manner of information at our bidding.

Syntagma is powered by WordPress software which operates dynamically, making constant calls to a serverside database to construct pages on the fly. It can be a slow process sometimes and is prone to error for the slightest of reasons.

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.

I must admit I was slightly dumbstruck when I heard that piece of information.

And that’s the shape of the future. Cloud computing, as it’s called, rather poetically, makes a local hard drive redundant. In future, if Google gets its way, we will work almost exclusively through our browsers, with applications in the “cloud”, that’s to say online in a form of super-RAM memory. Hence, the death of the database as we’ve known it.

The British Government is addicted to creating endless databases containing every fact about us. Most of them don’t work, and they leak information faster than the Colorado River leaks water. Ministers might like to consider cloud computing as a cheaper alternative.

Of course, it may seem a bit risky to entrust all your information to a single company holding it in the most fleeting form of remembrance possible, but that’s what the future looks like.

Imagine not having to keep offsite backup copies of everything on a second drive or memory stick. Think how cheap computers will become if they don’t need hard drives or massive operating systems, like Windows. Conjure up a world where everything can be done on a small box — any small box, anywhere in the world — and with the minimum of equipment and maintence. In fact, think smartphone, enlarged for more comfort and ease of use.

Clive Sinclair used to claim that you could run a nuclear power station on his little ZX80 computer back in the early 1980s. I always refused to believe that, but he may have been right. In the next decade we’ll be able to run the world from a BlackBerry.

Clouds and blackberries. William Wordsworth would feel very much at home in the 21st century.

John Evans

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