
....Just another participant in my nautical metaphor about who is navigating the treacherous waters of the rising digital tide...
Here is a relevant quote about the importance of the database from O'Reilly's famous "What is Web 2.0":
"Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML." Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software...This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?"
Here is a video explanation with the key players