by Angela Guess
Mike Loukides has commented on the recent Oracle NoSQL announcement. Loukides writes, “Oracle’s turn-about announcement of a NoSQL product wasn’t really surprising. When Oracle spends time and effort putting down a technology, you can bet that its secretly impressed, and trying to re-implement it in its back room. So Oracle’s paper Debunking the NoSQL Hype should really have been read as a backhanded product announcement. (By the way, don’t click that link; the paper appears to have been taken down. Surprise.)”
He continues, “I have to agree with DataStax and other developers in the NoSQL movement: Oracle’s announcement is a validation, more than anything else. It’s certainly a validation of NoSQL, and it’s worth thinking about exactly what that means. It’s long been clear that NoSQL isn’t about any particular architecture. When databases as fundamentally different as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Neo4J can all be legitimately characterized as ‘NoSQL,’ it’s clear that NoSQL isn’t a ‘thing.’ We’ve become accustomed to talking about the NoSQL ‘movement,’ but what does that mean?”
Loukides adds, “As Justin Sheehy, CTO of Basho Technologies said, the NoSQL movement isn’t about any particular architecture, but about architectural choice. For as long as I can remember, application developers have debated software architecture choices with gusto. There were many choices for the front end; many choices for middleware; and careers rose and fell based on those choices. Somewhere along the way, ‘Software Architect’ even became a job title. But for the backend, for the past 20 years there has really been only one choice: a relational database that looks a lot like Oracle (or MySQL, if you’d prefer). And choosing between Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or some other relational database just isn’t that big a choice.”
photo credit: Tim Morgan
