I Can’t Wait for NoSQL to Die: A nice rant against the NoSQL movement.  I feel largely the same way.  I concede there absolutely are situations where something other than a relational database is the right model, but they are very, very rare.

The idea is that object relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL have lapsed their useful lifetimes, and that document-based or schemaless databases are the wave of the future. Never mind of course that MySQL was the perfect solution to everything a few years ago when Ruby on Rails was flashing in the pan. Never mind that real businesses track all of their data in SQL databases that scale just fine. (For Silicon Valley readers, Walmart is a real business, Twitter is not.)

Boring as it might be, RDB technology is highly mature, and is the right choice most of the time.

Comments

1. Comment by Avi Block, March 28, 2010 10:10 am

   Sounds like this guy has not actually had any real experience with a NoSQL database.

2. Comment by Nick, March 28, 2010 6:07 pm

   Here’s a good article by Joe Stump about this.

3. Comment by Deane, March 28, 2010 9:57 pm

   I don’t disagree with his points, but the examples he’s pointing to are all atypical. Very few people are Google.

4. Comment by argatxa, March 31, 2010 8:03 am

   Just choose the right tool for the job.
   And for the case of monster databases… data partitioning and static data caching are your friends. Do you need to link everything to everything? In the case of facebook, do they need to have on hot storage every single message?

   My 2p…

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