RE: No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam

"Bingo. IOW, a group of inexperienced and incompetent developers decides to "write a web 2.0 site" and shazam, now "ALL enterprises should do the same". I seem to recall that same argument with the shopping carts of 8 years ago."

I'd be very careful making these kinds of statements. In my experience, the folks working at companies like Google, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LiveJournal, etc. are easily as bright and experienced as the folks who work in tech at banks, pharmaceuticals, etc.

They've simply made a different determination - that the cost of using a relational database in a scale-up or scale-out configuration is greater than the cost of using one of these non-traditional data stores. Many of these companies have data needs that scale exponentially with increases in revenue. Consequently, scale is of extreme importance, as is performance. I know an online advertising startup that has been up and running for less than a year and already has close to 50TB of data it's analyzing, and they expect that to grow around 1TB/day through 2009, and as high as 10TB/day through 2010. They do indeed collapse data periodically, etc., but still - if they were going to buy that kind of horsepower with Oracle, how much would they spend?

Instead, they use CouchDB and another non-SQL-esque database whose name I can't remember. Since they wrote their apps from scratch, there was equal cost to develop against those as there would be against Oracle/MySQL/SQL Server.

Of course, the article is overblown and hyperbolic, because that makes for a much better story. But the reality is that while SQL-based, ACID-compliant databases are not going anywhere, there are other data storage models out there that may fit better, depending on your application.

So why can't we have both?

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org on behalf of Nuno Souto Sent: Fri 7/3/2009 11:15 AM
Cc: Oracle-L_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam  

Sunil Kanderi wrote,on my timestamp of 3/07/2009 4:47 AM:

> aversion to understanding SQL. At this point these NoSQL alternatives do
> not seem to apply to the enterprises, but mostly to Web 2.0 based
> applications.

Bingo. IOW, a group of inexperienced and incompetent developers decides to "write a web 2.0 site" and shazam, now "ALL enterprises should do the same". I seem to recall that same argument with the shopping carts of 8 years ago.

> the broader Oracle community thinks about these alternatives especially
> with Cloud computing and databases on the cloud, fast catching on within
> the enterprises.

No they are not. That those who claim cloud whatever is the solution to global warming doesn't necessary make it true: it's just another marketing lie, sorry, campaign.

> At my work place, we are migrating all out
> hardware/database infrastructure to a hosted platform and I wouldn't be
> surprised if within the next three years all our applications being
> totally supported on a cloud platform.

There is a world of difference between a hosted platform which is basically an outsourced data centre, and cloud computing.

> Here is a good discussion on the article sited above.
>
> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=683807

My suggestion is: don't waste anytime with this nonsense. It's nothing but another pile of unsubstantiated and baseless boulderdash pushed by the same folks who gave us the dotcom burst and who haven't yet realised the time when the "next big thing" was terribly exciting is now utterly and completely GONE.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
in sunny Sydney, Australia
dbvision_at_iinet.net.au
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