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Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

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Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#4
In short: 1) No ACID Equals No Interest 2) A Low-Level Query Language is Death, and 3) NoSQL Means No Standards. ACID, complex querying, and standards matters when dealing with something more than a string dealing with what someone had for lunch.

But while Stonebraker is convincing and very credible, can his message really compare with these talking heads? http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/

Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#5
The disclosure at the bottom is laughable. It should read, "Michael Stonebraker has a strong economic incentive to steer enterprises away from NoSQL. Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money. Hence, his opinions should be considered in this light." Oh, and full disclosure, I have a strong economic interest in promoting NoSQL.

Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#6
It's a funny thing.

Very powerful and scalable parallel SQL-based RDBMS systems have been commercially available for a long time. Also, I think that scalability concerns about ACID are exaggerated: ACID doesn't reach Facebook or Amazon scale, but there's only 5,000 or so sites that are that big.

A converse question to the one they ask is, "Why aren't web developers interested in Commercial Parallel RDBMS" and I think the answer to that is that there are a generation of us who grew up using open source databases, who find the thought of using a commercial database like sticking their hand in a toilet... Even if it's a reasonably priced product like SQL Server's Web Edition.

A lot of people see mysql and pgsql as going nowhere, so there's a lot of interest in something like mongodb which has a future.

Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#7
Another big reason: money is not an issue. You want to create ten interconnected tables w/ a bajillion records each, then query across them needlessly every microsecond? No problem, with enough money and hardware there are ways to make almost anything happen using commercial SQL databases.

Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#8
post #6

It's a funny thing. Very powerful and scalable parallel SQL-based RDBMS systems have been commercially available for a long time. Also, I think that scalability concerns about ACID are exaggerated: ACID doesn't reach Facebook or Amazon scale, but there's only 5,000 or so sites that are that big. A converse question to the one they ask is, "Why aren't web developers interested in Commercial Parallel RDBMS" and I think…

> pgsql as going nowhere

Eh?! They just released a major update with long-awaited functionality!

Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#9
post #6

It's a funny thing. Very powerful and scalable parallel SQL-based RDBMS systems have been commercially available for a long time. Also, I think that scalability concerns about ACID are exaggerated: ACID doesn't reach Facebook or Amazon scale, but there's only 5,000 or so sites that are that big. A converse question to the one they ask is, "Why aren't web developers interested in Commercial Parallel RDBMS" and I think…

On the contrary, almost all of Facebook's data is stored in SQL systems. Cassandra and such were developed as ephemeral stores for certain types of data, like lists of people who "Like" certain things, but ultimately even that data is backed by SQL. (As far as I understand from my friends who work there.)

Re: Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

#10
The disappointing aspect isn't that they aren't interested in it, it's that they don't know about it.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of trendy technologies that I have no use for. But its good to know about them. I probably have about equal use for NoSql as I do SQL (the first professional code I ever wrote was a NoSql database, although we didn't call it that back then).

You choose what's best for the job, but in order to know what's best you have to know what's out there.

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