NoSQL explained correctly (finally)

Now here is a definition of “NoSQL” that I can agree with:

A very interesting write-up with one little oversight: you’re wrong.

I am part of a large program to write a NoSQL database for military applications. It’s not a backlash against paying Oracle (the DoD has a blanket license for Oracle installations) or a philosophical stance by the hippies in the defense arena; it’s the fact that RDBMSs are built in a different space in the CAP trades (see this article).

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and DARPA all recognized that when you scale systems large enough, you can never put enough iron in one place to get the job done (and you wouldn’t want to, to prevent a single point of failure). Once you accept that you have a distributed system, you need to give up consistency or availability, which the fundamental transactionality of traditional RDBMSs cannot abide. Based on the realization that something fundamentally different needed to be built, a lot of Very Smart People tackled the problem in a variety of different ways, making different trades along the way. Eventually, we all started getting together and trading ideas, and we realized that we needed some moniker to call all of these different databases that were not the traditional relational databases. The NoSQL name was coined more along the lines of “anything outside of the SQL part of the Venn diagram” rather than “opposed to SQL”.

The NoSQL databases are a pragmatic response to growing scale of databases and the falling prices of commodity hardware. It’s not a noble counterculture movement (although it does attract the sort that have a great deal of mental flexibility), it’s just a way to get business done cheaper.

This is a comment to this article.

The commenter is dead on. There is nothing (well, very little) wrong with SQL. It’s an old language, but it’s still the best language that we have today when we need to retrieve data stored in tables. Nothing comes even close. And as a matter of fact, NoSQL products have typically very crippled query functionalities compared to SQL.

This is not to say that NoSQL is useless, but as the commenter correctly points out, NoSQL is just an extension of the current model to meet certain specific needs.

I bet that in ten years from now, we will still have a majority of SQL based systems complemented by a small portion of NoSQL frameworks.