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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?

#51

Post by jaxn »

aloneinkyoto wrote: post #50
jaxn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a Business Intelligence consultant for enterprises. We built reports, data warehouses, dashboards, etc. From my experience, the article is spot on, not linkbait. Maybe MongoDB is better once you have a well defined query that you need, but I think the point of the parent comment is that those examples of queries are ad-hoc. NoSQL is not as good as SQL when it comes to report specs that are constantly in…

Both of those queries are very easy to perform in MongoDB. For examples of how to easily model and query trees (CONNECT BY PRIOR in SQL) see: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Trees+in+MongoDB SUM(CASE IF col IN ('a','b','c') THEN 1 ELSE 0) can be implemented as a group or mapreduce query. I would say that you have a lot more power and flexibility in MongoDB compared to an average SQL database when it comes to ad-h…

I am not a MongoDB expert by any stretch, so please correct me where I am wrong.

The way I read your link it sounds like I need to store the data in a particular way in order to run a parent/child query. That is great if I know that I need that query at design time. What happens if I have tens of millions of records and need to run that report on an ad-hoc basis? Where the relationship may or may not be important?

What if I want to sum the "cost of goods sold" one day and the "items per transaction" the next? Does that not require someone to write code more complex than SQL? Because on Oracle a business analyst can open up Toad and run that query.

If I am wrong then it very well may be that the problem is one of the enterprise not being aware.

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

#52

Post by aloneinkyoto »

jaxn wrote: post #51
aloneinkyoto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those queries are very easy to perform in MongoDB. For examples of how to easily model and query trees (CONNECT BY PRIOR in SQL) see: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Trees+in+MongoDB SUM(CASE IF col IN ('a','b','c') THEN 1 ELSE 0) can be implemented as a group or mapreduce query. I would say that you have a lot more power and flexibility in MongoDB compared to an average SQL database when it comes to ad-h…

I am not a MongoDB expert by any stretch, so please correct me where I am wrong. The way I read your link it sounds like I need to store the data in a particular way in order to run a parent/child query. That is great if I know that I need that query at design time. What happens if I have tens of millions of records and need to run that report on an ad-hoc basis? Where the relationship may or may not be important? Wh…

Ease of use is subjective. I dont think writing a mapreduce job needs to be more complex than writing an equivalent SQL query. What really matters is elegance, flexibility and power.

My personal experince is that the MongoDB model seems to win in most cases. Especially when it comes to flexibility and ad-hoc querying. Having a real language (javascript) and a flexible schema tend to make most business problems easier to express.

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

#53

Post by ergo98 »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #37
edw519 wrote: post #19

Trivial example of what people need to know in enterprises: “Tell me whether pet rocks are selling better than Barbie dolls in the south?” What people really need to know: I already know from existing reporting that 984 orders (18% of our backlog) are already past due. For those 984 orders: - How many are for one item and how many are for multiples? - Do we own what we owe those customers? - If we do own it, is it in…

SQL is actually quite often a bad way to try to answer those questions, too! See http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/data-warehousing.html for an entertaining explanation. I believe MongoDB in particular can be a fairly good solution to build datawarehouses (I'm starting to use it for reporting systems). One great point about MongoDB is that it makes the ETL process a lot easier (you don't have to prepare tables with the…

>SQL is actually quite often a bad way to try to answer those questions, too! See http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/data-warehousing.html for an entertaining explanation.

That's why data warehouses rely upon cubes/OLAP for analysis. It is a specialized solution that serves the need very well.

>One great point about MongoDB is that it makes the ETL process a lot easier (you don't have to prepare tables with the right schema and it supports large amounts of data).

So does a CSV. In fact, so does the last silver bullet, which is XML. XML is a loose or as strict as you want it to be.

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

#57

Post by gamble »

NoSQL has technical merits, but it seems to me like a good chunk of the interest in it is driven by distaste for SQL and the complexity of RDB systems in general. There are a lot of programmers out there who shudder at the thought of delving below the ORM, much less writing a stored procedure.

Big companies may be many things, but one thing they are not is afraid of RDBMs. Enterprises are filled with the kind of people who dedicate their lives to learning every in and out of Oracle or DB2. Not to mention that these are the people traditional RDBMs products are designed for. They just don't have the same pain points as startups.

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

#58

Post by ratsbane »

edw519 wrote: post #19

Trivial example of what people need to know in enterprises: “Tell me whether pet rocks are selling better than Barbie dolls in the south?” What people really need to know: I already know from existing reporting that 984 orders (18% of our backlog) are already past due. For those 984 orders: - How many are for one item and how many are for multiples? - Do we own what we owe those customers? - If we do own it, is it in…

Having spent an unpleasantly large part of my life enmeshed in it, I strongly disagree with the last statement "with really good application software on top of it."

Otherwise, spot-on.

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

#59

Post by mmt »

dasht wrote: post #31

I think a lot of the comments here (not all) display a relative naivete about what is meant by ACID and why the physical / logical separation of SQL is vital to the point about ad hoc queries. It's ironic because some of those comments complain about enterprise types not knowing about NoSQL while, at the same time, the comment makers seem to not (really) know about SQL RDBMS systems.

I, too, have found this to be the general case.

I speculate that this is because they consider MySQL to be the archetype RDBMS. I have yet to run into such depth of misconception from those who work with Postgres.

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

#60

Post by ahi »

The entire premise is wrong because there is nothing to compare the survey data to.

"44% of enterprise users questioned had never heard of NoSQL and an additional 17% had no interest. So why are 61% of enterprise users either ignorant about or uninterested in NoSQL?"

Is 61% high or low compared non-enterprise users? Maybe 61% of all users are either ignorant or uninterested.

Unrelated, if you're in IT and are unaware of NoSQL databases you kind of suck at your job. Not saying you have to use them, but you should at least know they exist when the tech news is saturated with them.

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