NoSQL No More

PgSQL is great for a lot of things, but I would argue that if you're using it you're betting on your overall product/service having some other killer advantage than data processing. The competent wing of the NoSQL crowd are using it in strange ways that enable new classes of product and service that cannot be achieved with PgSQL.

They're meant for situations where you have data that doesn't fit well into a relational database model, and you need to run BIG queries (think PageRank) over the entire data in a fault-tolerant way. For instance thinking about PageRank, how many discrete data elements are in a single web page? This is "higher-order" data that in a relational database might have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of columns per row.

Of course there are also in-memory transactional databases called NoSQL databases which are meant to be replacements for the traditional relational data store, but those are a very different beast from the original NoSQL data model.

It's still sad that because of Mozilla and Microsoft we have no SQL API in all HTML5 browsers :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSQL

IndexedDB is fine for storing JSON objects, etc. but a relational database with SQL query syntax, indexes, etc. more powerful and means less code to write. With IndexedDB one has to reinvent the wheel to just get basic query features.

WebSQL is not deprecation, the W3C Working Group Note actually says:

  'This specification is no longer in active maintenance 
  and the Web Applications Working Group does not intend to 
  maintain it further'.

As SQLite is in public domain, no company would "loose their face" if they choose to use it. They could fork off SQLite and change the SQL query syntax (parser) to whatever the W3C finds suitable. https://www.sqlite.org

Mozilla Firefox and FirefoxOS both already ship SQLite for years and can be accessed by its internal JavaScript API. And several Microsoft products already use it anyway (e.g. Forza Xbox games). Microsoft has of course also various other SQL database libraries like MS Access JetRed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine ), MS Outlook JetBlue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine ) and MS SQL Server Express (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Server_Express ) the SQL backend originally forked off for WinFS for Longhorn (Vista beta). It would be trivial for Microsoft to choose one of its many SQL engines and add it to IE 12. The same goes for Mozilla (just expose the API of SQLite).

For some reason Oracle and Mozilla pushed IndexedDB. Oracle has conflicting interests, as it owns OracleDB(SQL), MySQL (SQL) and BerkeleyDB (NoSQL and now also SQL support, based on SQLite). Oracle is an official "sponsor" of SQLite development and even ships it as part of it's BerkeleyDB package: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technolo... and https://www.sqlite.org/index.html#consortium_members

Mozilla tried to explain why they prefer IndexedDB over WebSQL: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-... and by an Mozilla dev https://web.archive.org/web/20130723044210/http://blog.vlad1... (I generally like Firefox and FirefoxOS but not implementing WebSQL is one of the worst actions that of Mozilla org, IMHO).

One can speculate that a less powerful HTML5 API translates in the long run to more SQL server licenses for Oracle and Microsoft. If the web app devs cannot do the processing & storage on the client side, one has to do it on the server side.

Anyway, I hope that we get an SQL API for HTML 5.x that also Mozilla and/or Microsoft implements. As of now WebSQL works fine in Webkit based browser which includes Safari, Chrome, Opera and includes also 95% of all smart phones.

Sqlite has been around for almost 15 years now. It's time to adopt it as a standard. Even if they're not satisfied with it, they can easily put a 'draft' stamp on it and provide people with a working, well-tested way to use it today. Firefox already has the support for it since your internal settings and favorites are also stored in guess what.... SQLite databases!

What's even more confusing is that Mozilla is actually listed on the Sqlite.org webpage as a sponsor, but they refuse to land it in Firefox. All because of hipster politics and creative arguments like the one above.

Sure it can use work. Migrations suck. But it will never evolve any further as long as they refuse to adopt it.