

SciDB – relational daddy answers Google, Hadoop, NoSQL - bensummers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/13/michael_stonebraker_interview/

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arethuza
I've been designing and developing systems for over twenty years and in the
last few months I've been using "NoSQL" databases a fair bit (CouchDB on the
server and implementing my own lightweight one within JavaScript on the
iPhone/iPad/...) and it's made me admit to a guilty secret: I hate SQL. In
fact, I've always hated SQL - I just never admitted it to anyone.

Very few applications I've ever designed ever seemed like a good fit when
mapped to a relational data model - they always looked ugly to me and the
resulting contortions required to map to and from in-memory objects pretty
much always made me wish there was a better way (ORMs seemed to help initially
but always became problematic in the long term).

The most common reaction from colleagues when I mention document oriented
databases is "they will become a mess over time". Sorry, _every_ large
commercial application that I have seen that uses SQL databases is already a
mess. Look at your average production ERP data model - they are usually things
of Lovecraftian nightmares.

If he is amazed that Facebook can run with MySQL "40,000" ways, then I'm
equally amazed that SAP can run at all! However, both seem to work fairly
happily - just because you don't personally like a technology doesn't mean
that others can't be perfectly happy with it.

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rbanffy
Can you imagine an ERP running on a non-relational database? The complexity of
the ERP SQL database does not reflect a failure of the relational model more
than the insanely complicated nature of the problem being solved.

Interestingly, I started my career on NoSQL databases in the 80's. We just
didn't call them that at the time.

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arethuza
I don't see why not - ERP concepts probably predate relational databases. The
biggest problem would probably be reporting - but you could have a NoSQL
database for operational entities and a link to either a relational or
dedicated OLAP database for reporting.

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siculars
Getting through that article was quite difficult, numerous typos. What
happened to 'editors'? Basically Stonebraker, who should generally be read, is
saying don't count ACID out just yet.

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rbanffy
> What happened to 'editors'?

The ad blockers killed them...

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planckscnst
And it was the abusive use of flickering, garish ads that brought them into
popularity.

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JonnieCache
Single page view:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/13/michael_stonebraker_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/13/michael_stonebraker_interview/print.html)

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serichsen
That is an interesting article, but sloppy writing.

