At least two of the end-user customer presentations at the FASTforward conference involved deployments that invoked search-based querying that got around what would have been more onerous structured database projects.

Edward Longo, VP of information technology for retirement services at ING, was challenged with providing data access to six million retirement plan participants within 40,000 retirement plans serviced by the company. The traditional approach — running SQL queries in batch mode against databases — kept their systems busy until 4 am each morning, and the workload was growing. “The relational database or OLAP database wasn’t going to work for us,” he said. “The current data mart approach was not sufficient.” The mart needed to store 500 GBs of data, covering 400 million transactions covering 18 months of history. The load time for all this information was seven to 10 hours, he said.

With search technology in place, the company was able to increase its levels of aggregation from four levels within the relational databases to 140 available aggregations.

At Merrill Lynch, a single search and discovery portal was employed to replace SQL-based queries to multiple silos of data across various units and services across the globe. “SQL was not ideal for searching — it was too slow, said Zach Friedland, vice president of enterprise data solutions for Merrill Lynch. The firm’s EDS Search portal (for Enterprise Data Solutions) links against messaging across the enterprise. “We have no data warehouse at all here, since we’re processing the same messages that we use to send to our systems,” he said. Friedland’s team did, however, build a data warehouse off of the navigators used for the search and discovery portal. “We built a warehouse off of the search engine, which is the reverse of the way it’s usually done.” he said.

Is the traditional relational database dead, then? “No,” said ING’s Longo. “Not for companies with lots of legacy systems.”

Most enterprises rely on relational databases for enterprise information management and access, and this will remain the case for a long time to come. But they now have an alternative that will open up new avenues of information and access where it has not been possible before. As data warehouse/business intelligence guru Bill Inmon observes in his discussion with Dave Weinberger (video posted below), search opens up new dimensions for BI, empowering users to better reach and analyze data from all corners of the enterprise.