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I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

teddziuba.com

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#41
post #7

Ted's point may be valid for BigTable-like databases. (I'm not saying it is, but I don't know enough about those to say so.) Those are designed for scalability and if you don't need the scalability you probably should use a RDBMS instead. But there are other advantages of SQL-less databases that don't deal with scale. I deployed my first MongoDB app a couple weeks ago. Even though it was a small (~1 developer month)…

I got downvoted awfully last night for trying to say this, but I'll say it again to back you up: Developing with mongodb is _lightning fast_ and holds up very very well. If you end up with problems, switch to SQL later! I don't think a lot of these people hating on the nosql projects have actually tried building something with them.

Switching back and forth between Mongo and SQL is not without technical cost. The syntax and semantics are quite different and translating complex queries to map/reduce is also a problem.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#42
"Did you know that Cassandra requires a restart when you change the column family definition? Yeah, the MySQL developers actually had to think out how ALTER TABLE works, but according to Cassandra, that's a hard problem that has very little business value. Right."

Really did the MySQL people think about it? because it takes ages to do an ALTER. Even when you are doing something like dropping an index it can lock up for hours, where no one can do any inserts. In contrast restarting a service is no big deal.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#43
I recorded a list of issues that may prevent you from using Cassandra as a general purpose website storage right now.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/is-cassandra-ready-yet

It appears as though Ted's complaint about needing to restart Cassandra to modify ColumnFamilies (tables) is nearly obselete. A patch for the last remaining subtask has been submitted.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got downvoted awfully last night for trying to say this, but I'll say it again to back you up: Developing with mongodb is _lightning fast_ and holds up very very well. If you end up with problems, switch to SQL later! I don't think a lot of these people hating on the nosql projects have actually tried building something with them.

Why is it faster?

you don't even have to think about schemas or SQL, you can focus completely in whatever your language of choice is.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#45
post #4

+1 for the Batman rollerblader. But that's about it. Use what works, some apps do justify nosql off the bat. Many don't.

He's a fixture of Seattle's big Solstice parade: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daffodilious/3646480480/

Keep digging through that photoset and you'll probably see pix of the naked bikers, too.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#47
post #35
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is simply because most high volume sites don't use these things anyways because they get very hard to scale later on. If you start with the assumption that "you don't need a DBA" then that's probably true. Just to give you an idea of my background, I work on a system using a commercial RDBMS that "scales" to thousands of commits/sec and tens of terabytes of data. We expect to take it to tens of thousands of comm…

I think that the message wasn't "app database-agnosticism", but "framework database-agnoticism".

That's what I got from it too. The framework being this flexible should help a DBA fully use the database to his advantage. The project I work on has had to do some non standard things with Rails and it's flexibility has made it much easier. In our view rails and it's default are a starting point providing the basic infrastructure to get the project going, not an end all be all solution. I see the same thing in NoSQL solutions, they try to give the developers and DBA as much flexibility as possible. They don't really seem to offer any default. RDBMS is basically the sensible defaults without the flexibility. Maybe the in between can be found.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#48
post #7

Ted's point may be valid for BigTable-like databases. (I'm not saying it is, but I don't know enough about those to say so.) Those are designed for scalability and if you don't need the scalability you probably should use a RDBMS instead. But there are other advantages of SQL-less databases that don't deal with scale. I deployed my first MongoDB app a couple weeks ago. Even though it was a small (~1 developer month)…

I got downvoted awfully last night for trying to say this, but I'll say it again to back you up: Developing with mongodb is _lightning fast_ and holds up very very well. If you end up with problems, switch to SQL later! I don't think a lot of these people hating on the nosql projects have actually tried building something with them.

I agree that developing with MongoDB is really really nice. We'll see how it holds up under more load, but for prototyping data models I have not used a better stack than mongodb + mongomapper

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#49
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the point of starting with NoSQL and then going for Oracle. NoSQL DBs are real tools you know, not toys you through after your app gets traction. It's actually the contrary that has happened so far.

Maybe I should have been clear. You only go to SQL RDBMS if you need it. Which, in the vast majority of cases you will not. Further, you only go to SQL where you need it. For instance, right now someone is developing a street car racing game for Facebook. The XBox kind, not the FarmVille kind. At any rate, one of the features is obviously, playback. Now keeping all of those physics updates in an SQL is pointless. And…

Isn't Cassandra slightly more complicated than MySQL? Sure adding another column is trivial, but the access patterns & indexing need to be determined first.

Re: I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die

#50
post #11

There are a rash of these articles popping up. While there are usually valid points in urging people to avoid the hype of the "next big thing", a lot of these guys seem to be bitching that they might have to learn a new skill set. I have been in this business long enough to remember Clipper and FoxPro devs bitching about SQL when it was on the rise. This sounds about the same to me.

These articles are just link-bait with no content. The 'NoSQL' buzzword is as distasteful to me as, say, 'cloud', but that doesn't mean that articles discussing them don't have value.

The flurry of 'NoSQL' articles often cover the different approaches to data stores, their implementation, their interfaces, their management, performance, scalability, etc. That interests me, but doesn't mean I'm going to go to work on Monday and kill all the non-NoSQL dbs we have running.

Hate-against-hype articles are waaaaay overrated.

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