by Angela Guess
A recent article offers insight into the current state and future prospects of NoSQL solutions. Conor O’Mahony writes, “Matt Asay wrote an interesting article for The Register titled SQL Survives Murder Attempt by Mutant Stepchild where he opines that ‘NoSQL remains a tiny blip in the overall datastore universe.’ And he’s correct. When it comes to the universe of data management deployments, NoSQL usage is a tiny fraction of the overall data management market. The term NoSQL implies that these emerging data management technologies are fighting the SQL establishment. I would argue that, instead, they are fighting the traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) establishment. The NoSQL movement has evolved out of a loose association of technologies that solve challenges that traditional relational solutions are not designed to solve well.”
O’Mahony continues, “While these situations are a relatively small part of the data management universe, they are nonetheless important. After all, these emerging technologies are meeting a very real market need, and the likelihood is that this market need will grow as the business world shifts towards use cases where these NoSQL solutions shine. So, essentially we have a situation where a bunch of data management technologies are emerging to solve a subset of data management challenges that are not well served by currently available technologies. I expect that some of these NoSQL use cases will evolve into reasonable, if relatively small, segments of the overall data management market.”
photo credit: Gary Bridgman
