by Angela Guess
A recent article discusses the aspects of NoSQL solutions that are causing them to stand apart from the crowd. The article states, “Everywhere you look, there are new NoSQL databases — or ‘data stores,’ if you’re one of those who feel that the word ‘database’ can only be used by proper relational software offering belts-and-suspenders compliance with the ACID rules. Some of these new databases are quite sophisticated, while others are deliberately bare bones. But all are intended to deliver high performance by trading away the power of a relational database. Let the banks and their nervous programmers worry that Aunt Millie’s pension check is deposited correctly, they say. You can’t get your kicks if you’re constantly checking everything in triplicate.”
It continues, “In most cases, the NoSQL rebels succeeded in building something that’s blazingly fast and fairly scalable — but only by abandoning traditional crutches. Old school DBAs are shaking their heads and chuckling through the presentations because they’re sure the whippersnappers are going to stumble over the problems the veterans have already fixed. But the whippersnappers don’t care because they have different project needs in mind. They’re aiming at new targets.”
The article adds, “What is surprising is how different the NoSQL projects are turning out to be. Whereas the old relational space largely converged on a set of features and a standard language, these new databases are all built by people going in their own direction. The packages may take basic pairs of keys and values, but they’re tuned for different use cases. The major variations aren’t in the format of the data but in how often it’s replicated, cached, and sharded.”
photo credit: shahsjunkie
