We all know what SQL is, get ready to learn about NoSQL. There was a meet-up last month in San Francisco to discuss it and some details are available at this link. The call for the “inaugural get-together of the burgeoning NoSQL community” drew 150 people and if you are so inclined, you can subscribe to the email list here.
I’m no expert at NoSQL but the major gripe seems to be schema restriction and what Jon Travis calls “twisting your object” data to fit an RDBMS.
NoSQL appears to be a newly coined collective pronoun for a lot of technologies you have heard about before. They include Hadoop, BigTable, HBase, Hypertable, and CouchDB, and maybe some that you have not heard of before like Voldemort, Cassandra, and MongoDb.
But, then there is this thing called NoSQL. The first line on that web page reads
NoSQL is a fast, portable, relational database management system without arbitrary limits, (other than memory and processor speed) that runs under, and interacts with, the UNIX 1 Operating System.
Now, I’m confused. Is this the NoSQL that was referenced in the non-conference at non-san-francisco last non-month?
My Point of View
From what I’ve seen so far, NoSQL seems to be a case of disruption at the “low end”. By “low end”, I refer to circumstances where the data model is simple and in those cases I can see the point that SQL imposes a very severe overhead. The same can be said in the case of a model that is relatively simple but refers to “objects” that don’t relate to a relational model (like a document). But, while this appears to be “low end” disruption right now, there is a real reason to believe that over time, NoSQL will grow into more complex models.
But, the big benefit of SQL is that it is declarative programming language that gave implementations the flexibility of implementing the program flow in a manner that matched the physical representation of the data. Witness the fact that the same basic SQL language has produced a myriad of representations and architectures ranging from shared nothing to shared disk, SMP to MPP, row oriented to column oriented, with cost based and rules based optimizers etc., etc.,
There is (thus far) a concern about the relative complexity of the NoSQL offerings when compared with the currently available SQL offerings. I’m sure that folks are giving this considerable attention and what comes next may be a very interesting piece of technology.
Hype Cycles 