Your website may be safe from all the cross-site and cross-frame scripting attacks that the kiddies throw at you, but that doesn’t mean you are in the clear. Real hackers (meaning those over the age of 16, with degrees in computer science and an empty fridge that needs money to fill) are trying to get at your database, and with rising frequency.

Now you can wait for your database provider to issue a seemingly never-ending series of patches (and get the same warm, fuzzy feeling as being a PC user), pull out the dusty manuals (dusty since your app has been doing all the queries for you and you forgot what an SQL command was) and fix it yourself, or shift data collection to another provider (which may be less costly at the margin line than spending the time on the first two options).

Your call.

So I am mulling this real time streaming data concept when I come across this article from Forbes: Data On The Fly. It talks about Michael Stonebraker of Ingres and Postgres fame, who started a new company called Streambase. This outfit has produced a derivative of SQL they call StreamSQL, and the claim is it can process data as it comes in the pipe, before it is written to disk. Great for big hedge funds and market makers.

Seems like this StreamSQL could prove a pretty interesting tool for a peer-to-peer database network. Finding out what data you really need to hold on to before you write would fit into the limited storage capacity scenario likely existing at each node in such a network.