

NoSQL as a governance arbitrage - cpswan
http://blog.thestateofme.com/2011/09/24/nosql-as-a-governance-arbitrage/

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andyjpb
Hi,

On the one hand I hope his friend is right: RDBMS isn’t suddenly a useless
technology. It does, however, suffer from an image problem. Both in terms of
the ‘cult of the DBA’ (and their friends the ‘priesthood of storage’) as well
as more emotional reactions to limitations of certain widespread and freely
available engines. It seems that RDBMS as a whole has been tarred with that
brush.

From where I’m standing, most of the NoSQL advocates have had a bad experience
and want something else. That doesn’t mean that the big, professional,
commercial engines haven’t been pulling their weight for a long time on
enormous data sets. It’s just that perhaps NoSQL users have never had the
opportunity to either see that, or afford it. I find it hard to believe that
the average NoSQL user today has significantly more data than the biggest
RDBMS users of yesteryear.

Of course, there are other factors in play as well. RDBMS has always had a
reputation of being difficult to use and difficult or costly to architect for.
Data Architecture as a discipline seems to be well and truly out of fashion
and I’m guessing that the majority of NoSQL deployments are still small enough
that it’s possible to brute force the way through, especially with hardware
being what it is today. It remains to be seen whether this becomes a problem,
or is admitted as a problem, in the long term.

There’s also the issue of talent. Using NoSQL allows you to attract the kind
of developer that likes to use modern tools and keep themselves current. We
have a quote on file from a CTO of a large web company that attests to the
fact that his decision to “Go NoSQL” was motivated more by his desire to
attract a generation of new talant than the feature lists of the engines.

Finally, whilst it may be the case that NoSQL users currently have relatively
small datasets, the fact that it’s now possible to juggle large amounts of
data inexpensively will almost certainly open up a whole host of opportunities
that would previously have gone unexplored.

Regards, @ndy

