Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Fri Feb 10 17:15:03 CST 2012
Actually I think you have it right...cheap. Many fledgling businesses would not exist if it was not for NoSQL DBs. (Google, Amazon, Facebook come mind.) All the companies started out a garage or dorm business and have grown into the super companies they now are today. The only reason they could have started was because of cheap and free Open Source software with particular emphasis on NoSQL DBs. RDBMS industry standard databases are some of the most expensive pieces of software in the market today. A small company should plan on spending 60K just to get their foot in the door and that is just the entrance fee. I worked under contract as Systems Analysis for a government office for a while. One of the chief responsibilities was to create a piece of software that could mange all the division's contracts. When the software was running, the client could view the initial contracts, all correspondence, emails, the support teams, the budgets, the invoices etc. It all ran from a MS Access and VB application. But then we ran into problems. The management requested a way be able to scan a group of contracts for specific information and wording. I was stuck...a thousand of more lines of code may have been able to assemble something close to what was required but that was not enough. A group of the senior systems guys from local Oracle companies were called in (The local government does not use MS SQL) to see if they could come up with an answer...they could not. Finally, a little fringe company produced a Oracle plug-in that could scan the mixed data. The software was something out of a European lab. That was the first time I ever saw a NoSQL piece of software; of course I and everyone else had no idea what we were looking at. Like RDBMS, NoSQL databases have their pluses and minuses. Nothing is a perfect answer. If all you will ever be working with is Mom and Pop type businesses don't bother looking any further, stick with standard relational data bases. If OTOH, you will be working with a growing web business or a business saving TBs of documents start looking at a mixed solution. Jim -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Stuart McLachlan Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2012 3:00 PM To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] NoSQL is a movement not so much a choice or a technology 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 > _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com