Federated Queries - enabling a Cloudy future?

I had a very enjoyable dinner last night hosted by Ken Oestreich, cloud-marketing god at EMC.  Jeff Nick, CTO of EMC was there along with Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, Cisco, Rodrigo Flores, founder of NewScale, Tim Crawford, CIO of AllCovered, Glenn Donithan, from Exceptional SW strategies and Bernard Golden, CEO HyperStratus and cloud blogger for CIO.com.

We talked about a variety of topics in the cloud world.  I'll let the cloud twiterati write about those.  But, we keep all those boxes running cloud systems in places called "data" centers for a reason - and eventually the conversation came to data.  

Tim Crawford asked Jeff Nick - "What are the challenges that EMC faces that you don't know the answers or path for?”  He thought for quite a while.  It was nice to see a considered response.  He saw resource sharing - Amazon AWS, server virtualizaton, etc - as a temporary/small part of the promise of cloud computing.  The real value comes when data flows from organization to organization and each can work on adding their unique value to the overall value.  There is so much more data outside the organizations four walls than inside - it cannot all be brought it.

This brought me back to Cohera right away - the federate query has value after 10 years (now? Or in 5 years?) In today’s architecture, what do federated query systems look like?

I'd maintain that you still need a declarative language for the queries.  You need to be able to query catalogs/metadata.  Organizations need to have control over provisioning for query response but also pub/sub streams - rates, obscucation, use rules, even billing.  Caching rules would also apply.  It must be over a RESTful interface...The future is closer than it may appear.