[dba-Tech] NoSQL is a movement not so much a choice or a technology

Stuart McLachlan stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Thu Feb 9 17:00:22 CST 2012


I agree with his first sentence.
<quote>In a conversation last year, Justin Sheehy, CTO of Basho, described NoSQL as a 
movement</quote>

But I'm not sure whether that should be "religious" or "bowel"  :-)

HIs major premise appears to be that  the major RDBMSs haven't changed since the '80s, 
nor apparently has the hardware they are run on and that those '80s systems aren't suitable 
for web applications.

Statements such as "It's a given that any modern application is going to be distributed. " are 
laughable but he builds the rest of the argument on it.

"reassess the way we define data"?
Data are data.  It doesn't need definition.   In essence, you are debating the way to store data 
and the way to retreive it.

ACID and CAP are two different things entirely.. 
It is clear, even in the article that CAP is not a set of rules.  It is a set of trade-offs
It's the data worlds equivalent of the developers "Good, Fast, Cheap - pick any two".

<quote>Since partition tolerance is a fundamental requirement for distributed applications, it 
becomes a question of what to sacrifice: consistency or availability. </quote>

Effectively, he's saying Fast is a fixed requirement, now let's strike the balance between 
Good an Cheap.  :-)

Sorry, I don't buy that either.


-- 
Stuart

On 9 Feb 2012 at 9:15, Jim Lawrence wrote:

> I have read and listened to many articles and even dabbled in (not
> necessarily successfully...yet) in the new world of NoSQL (or more
> accurately Map reduce) type databases.
> 
> These new structures are making us reassess the way we define data. The
> rules of ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) no longer
> apply, at least not in the way we have learned or have been taught. The new
> rules can be described as CAP (Consistency, Availability,
> Partition-tolerance).
> 
> Below is a link to a very thoughtful article, not one a busy person could
> read through quickly and fully understand but as the article probably took
> weeks to write maybe it should take a few days to read.
> 
> http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/02/nosql-non-relational-database.html
> 
> Jim 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> dba-Tech mailing list
> dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com
> http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech
> Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> 




More information about the dba-Tech mailing list