by Angela Guess
Klint Finley of DevOpsAngle recently opined that NoSQL solutions are in need of a common language. He writes, “UnQL, under development by Couchbase, Microsoft and SQLiteis one of the most ambitious NoSQL query language projects I know of. The project seeks to deliver a universal SQL-like query language for document databases and other relatively well-structured non-relational databases… Couchbase SVP of Products James Phillips says that so far there aren’t any partners other than Couchase, Microsoft and SQLlite, but anyone could build support for the language into an open source document database. So even if MongoDB, Apache CouchDB and BigCouch don’t officially support UnQL, someone could build an extension to provide support for UnQL into them.”
Finley continues, “Phillips says that the project is currently focused only on document databases, not key-value stores or graph databases. That means other data stores with traction – such as Apache Cassandra, HBase and Riak – won’t be able to easily support UnQL, if at all. There are a lot of databases that UnQL could eventually be used with, and a lot that it simply couldn’t be used with. Graph databases are so fundamentally different they require a much different approach. Gremlin is graph traversal language that has become the standard for working with graph databases. It’s supported by DEX, InfiniGraph, Neo4j and many others.”
