

NoSQL Is Technologically Inferior To SQL - kfool
http://chronicdb.com/blogs/nosql_is_technologically_inferior_to_sql

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kaib
What a disappointing piece of writing. Having worked with BigTable for several
years at my previous gig I find the whole premise of NoSQL hilarious. BigTable
really is a very specific solution to a very specific problem, creating a
datastore that can feed massive mapreduces efficiently. Basically you have a
design problem that nobody else is solving and you have the monetary resources
and knowledge to solve it yourself.

I'll be extremely delighted when the discussion starts revolving around how
well a solution fits a specific problem as opposed to declaring one or the
other solution inferior or superior. A single grading scale is not what a real
engineer uses.

For the record we use a "NoSQL" technology called flat files. Because our
challenge is making sure the right workers have the right data in memory, not
on disk.

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rch
I would like to have the term NoSQL come to mean 'manipulate data as you
naturally would in your language of choice, irrespective of the persistent
storage system.'

The tone of the current debate reflects poorly on everyone involved.

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dkersten
Agreed.

I like the Durable Clojure hack that someone wrote, because it basically adds
disk-backed durability to clojures ref types (which already have atomicity,
consistency and isolation). Having ACID guarantees on built-in data structures
reduces the need for databases for a lot of use cases and would be a lot nicer
to work with than having to deal with an external database.

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andrewcurioso
The site must be using NoSQL, since it is down for me right now. I wish it
would load, the article sounds interesting.

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vyrotek
Yeah, rather disappointing. It seems there's a text-only google cache of it.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://chronicdb.com/blogs/nosql_is_technologically_inferior_to_sql&hl=en&strip=1)

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jensnockert
Just says that you can emulate any NoSQL database with a SQL one, using multi-
master systems etc. And that NoSQL 'wants' to use SQL.

NoSQL for me is not about scaling, it is about having a different data and
query model that means creating new sorts of applications easier than with
plain old SQL.

That I can build a graph database or something with xSQL is not really
relevant. I can write webapps in C, but I made a conscious decision not to, I
also try to select the best datastore for the job.

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vyrotek
Our company uses a mix of both. The author mentions that one of the perceived
benefits is the "Flexibility of schema definition". We actually ended up
needing a NoSQL database for exactly that. We have one part of our system that
needed to store schema-less data in a way that still let us query it using the
custom data fields.

I wish we could have found a way to make it work within our SQL database but
none of the solutions that I could find felt right. Schema-less data and
complex queries (Group Bys, Distinct, etc) just don't seem to mix well with
most systems. I'd love to know if others have any experience in this area.

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kozlovsky
"How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data"
<http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql>

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wulczer
I wouldn't say it's technologically inferiot. I'd say it's less mature.

Making desing choices is OK. The authors admits that relational databases have
different design goals and thus comaring them directly is necessarily
comparing apples to oranges.

What is true and wise is that non-relational databases have been around for
much less time, have less theoretical background, the development teams and
DBAs are less experienced with them, etc.

