The importance of extensible database systems for e-commerce

Over the last decade, database system products have been extended to provide support for defining, storing, updating, indexing and retrieving complex data with full transaction semantics. Oracle, IBM, Informix and others have used extensibility technology to build database system extensions for text, image, spatial, audio/video, chemical, genetic and other types of complex data. Currently, we find database systems being deployed in support of e-commerce. In many cases, these e-commerce database applications use only simple SQL data types to represent items such as office supplies, computers, books and CDs. There is also a large and important set of e-commerce applications that employ complex data formats such as EDI, SWIFT and HL7. The database extensibility features initially developed to support text, spatial and similar forms of complex data are now being used to build e-commerce applications. Thus, database extensibility technology is evolving into an important mechanism to enable the development of e-commerce systems.