On Sun, Feb 13 2011, Anand Balachandran Pillai wrote: > I am sure many of you must have gone through this discussion, but > sharing it anyway since I liked the analogy he makes with SQL against > NoSQL compared to transmission in cars.
I liked the analogy but don't agree with the second paragraph. It's not only about size. Thanks to the dominance of SQL databases, everyone tends to think of them as the "default" and use noSQL only if necessary. That needn't be the case. Small (non Google, non Facebook) applications that need to store documents (e.g. a wiki) *might* work better with a noSQL backend than a relational one. > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2559411/sql-mysql-vs-nosql-couchdb > > It might be a cliche, but I kind of feel the current "NoSQL movement" > is simply a case of "The grass must be greener on the other side". I don't really follow "movements" but disagree agree with your general statement. The kinds of data and hardware that people are dealing with have changed and different problems are cropping up. The constraints and requirements have changed as well. New technologies have come up to address these problems and given that we live in these times, it's quite possible that the problems we face might fall into the categories for which these systems have been designed. It's unwise to summarily dismiss document stores out of the box. Also, the transition is not abrupt (SQL yesterday, noSQL today). SQL databases have been used in a semi schemaless fashion e.g. Triple stores[1], Entity-attribute-value model[2] etc. For some kinds of datasets, sound RDMS rules are violated to gain performance. e.g. Denormalisation[3]. These kinds of things indicate that RDBMs systems are not designed to handle certain classes of problems that are cropping up and new solutions have to be sought out. It's an engineering problem. Different situations call for different tools and solutions. I personally tend to ignore the whippersnappers with their "SQL suxx0rZ! noSQL roX!" outlook and the grumpy SQL advocates with their "Get off my lawn!" attitude. [...] Footnotes: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormalization -- _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
