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Michael Stonebraker: Why Enterprises Are Uninterested in NoSQL?

cacm.acm.org

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

#21
post #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.

Not sure why this is being downmodded. Stonebraker has a history of using his reputation to promote his businesses. Which is fine, but I don't think most people realize how much of a financial interest he has in downplaying nosql. Something his competitors like ahoff and I are very much aware of. :)

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

#22
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company CouchOne offers commercial support for CouchDB (which consequently has quite a bit of enterprise uptake, contrary to Stonebraker's assertions). I think there is something to the argument that without commercial support, companies won't be adopting these technologies.

I try to look at the bigger picture think how can companies like yours help companies like mine starting up so we can tear down the entrenched SQL forces.

> tear down the entrenched SQL forces.

Sounds like a terrible idea to me. What you should be doing is building new things where SQL is not such a good solution, rather than "tearing things down".

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

#23
post #21
post #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.

Not sure why this is being downmodded. Stonebraker has a history of using his reputation to promote his businesses. Which is fine, but I don't think most people realize how much of a financial interest he has in downplaying nosql. Something his competitors like ahoff and I are very much aware of. :)

It's a bit over the top: "Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money." - it's not like Stonebraker gets money every time someone sets up Mysql, or even Postgresql, which, IIRC, he was involved with at some early point in its history.

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

#24
post #14

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, b…

To play devil's advocate, aren't a lot of these places where it's best not to rock the boat and risk screwups? In other words, they'll learn about new things in good time once they have big companies advertising them and have been around the block once or twice. Whether that's sensible or not, I'm not in a position to judge, just that in that sort of world, perhaps learning about things a bit late is not a problem.

True enough. And in hindsight, I think asking people if they've heard of "NoSql" is somewhat an unfair question. The term itself is s trendy one. I'm sure there are probably people who have fixed more lines of code in NoSql databases than most people have here have written, and don't know that specific term.

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

#25
post #21
post #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.

Not sure why this is being downmodded. Stonebraker has a history of using his reputation to promote his businesses. Which is fine, but I don't think most people realize how much of a financial interest he has in downplaying nosql. Something his competitors like ahoff and I are very much aware of. :)

I'll admit it was a bit snarky, and written in haste. You said it much better. He wants to play the role of an objective observer here, almost like an expert journalist. But he definitely has skin in the game.

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

#26
Many years back before this NoSQL madness took off, I was building my own "NoSQL" database. It was fast, refreshing and it seemed like common sense. Then as I was adding more and more features, I realized my neat "NoSQL" (I didn't call it this though) database is turning into relational one. I've come full circle back to relational stores. Only then I fully understood why relational aspect is mathematically superior to any other paradigm out there and why it's only SQL that really sucks. Perhaps this will happen again to mainstream NoSQL movement. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.

So instead of making surveys why enterprises don't jump on NoSQL bandwagon, I would be more interested to know how many of NoSQL adopters ever heard of Codd's theorem or how many of them can differentiate between SQL and relational model. Relational model is a good thing, throwing it out and start from scratch feels like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. That's how I feel about NoSQL movement.

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

#27
Correct me if I'm wrong. I thought some of the "enterprises" have already using NoSQL as part of their data warehousing strategy?

To my knowledge (which might be wrong), there are companies out there such as Greenplum, Teradata, Netteza, Oracle Exadata that specialize in data-warehousing solution, have built their own DBMS based on column-oriented.

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

#28
About the proliferation of NoSQL, check out this Changelog episode where "things got a bit rowdy when the panel debated features of Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB and Amazon SimpleDB and started throwing dirt at everybody else’s favorite NoSQL databases." http://thechangelog.com/post/457259567/episode-0-1-8-nosql-s...

This is 6 months old btw.

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

#29
I'm not an enterprise guy at all, but here's another thing worth considering: if even I, web 2.0 dude, am a bit confused by the array of things out there, and think that waiting until they battle it out and only a few are left at the top might not be a bad strategy, what is some corporate IT guy going to think?

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

#30

The most disappointing thing about this post is the fact that we're supposed to be preaching "use the best tool for the job" to the young ones. And here is someone that anyone interested in database technologies has heard about and is regarded as an expert denouncing a whole slew of potential database solutions based on the opinion of one person. And ACM publishes it!

On the contrary the post explicitly goes into the reasons why current nosql solutions may not be appropriate for enterprise oltp systems. Seems to me that the post didn't say nosql solutions are bad for all enterprise apps just that rdbmses may be the better solution for the bulk of them. So that's not an argument to choose the right tool for the right job? I think it is...
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