
NoSQL: The Love Child of Google, Amazon and ... Lotus Notes - materialhero
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/couchdb/
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eykanal
What with the shelf-life of software being so short, it's very easy to forget
how programs that are now almost universally hated, derided, and synonymous
with "large, bloated corporations" (i.e., Lotus Notes) at one time represented
the state-of-the-art in software engineering.

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dagw
I worked with Notes and Domino quite a bit back in 97-98 and my memories of it
from that time are mostly positive. We used it for writing fairly ad-hoc
documentation and workflow management tools and also turning these into in-
house web apps. It also integrated very nicely with Lotus 1-2-3 and made it
easy to produce custom reports as spreadsheets with nice graphs and tables. It
was surprisingly smooth and easy to work with compared to anything else at the
time (and in many ways compared to most things that came after).

I haven't looked at Notes since 98, but I've occasionally been tempted to take
a look at later version to see how a tool I really quite liked managed to turn
itself into the most hated software in the industry.

~~~
nsxwolf
I started my developer career on Lotus Notes 4 back in 98. It offered a real
platform at a time when web applications weren't exactly trivial to create.
You could easily build database driven applications and deploy them instantly
to the entire organization.

Lotus and Domino were very forward looking products. I know the conventional
wisdom from users is that they were terrible, but I'll always have fond
memories of working with the technology.

~~~
zaphar
My sense from friends and colleagues who have used or developed for Lotus
notes is that Users generally hated it but people developing apps for it loved
it. I've always assumed the technology was solid but like most things in the
category of custom one-off but long lived software for companies the UI/UX was
almost always subpar.

~~~
DeepDuh
I think you nailed it. Notes apps that aren't developed with some strong UI
guidelines tend to look ugly. It's a bit like web 1.0 in terms of UI - good
developers can make neat and useful applications with it, but most of the
stuff just looks bad since useful guidelines weren't there yet when the tools
have first been developed.

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scott_s
_“NoSQL” is a misnomer. NoSQL databases aren’t designed to abandon SQL, the
structured query language used pull information from traditional databases
such as Oracle and MySQL. A better name would be “non-relational database.”
NoSQL databases don’t use the neat tables of data that underpin relational
databases._

Thank you. I've been beating that drum for a while.
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284>)

~~~
jfb
An actual relational database not bound to the SQL nightmare would be
something interesting indeed.

~~~
linuxhansl
What "SQL nightmare" is this?

For the record, I mostly work on "NoSQL" databases now (am an HBase
committer). But I have no qualms with SQL, and it is certainly not a
nightmare.

~~~
jfb
The godawful syntax (UPDATE vs INSERT). The godawful semantics -- it's not
closed under composition, for instance; too, it is not set based, which means
all kinds of hideous contortions with DISTINCT and whatnot.

I don't have much time for the K/V stores (save Redis) but I'm also sick like
unto death with SQL.

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gadders
TBH, Lotus Notes as of right now is probably not a fantastic solution to
whatever problem you may have.

However, I think it is largely a mistake to judge software that was state of
the art from 15+ years ago by today's standards.

In those days, most databases didn't really handle replication particularly
well. Notes was the most fully-featured in that respect.

In addition network speeds and bandwiths were lower than they are now, so it
wasn't really feasible for a global company to have everybody hit a single
database instance.

Lotus Notes programming was simple, so if you could write a Lotus or Excel
macro, you could create a database for your team. This made it popular for
semi-technical end users.

It also pre-dates HTML, so web browsers and thin clients weren't really
available.

Having said all that, I'd still take Notes over Sharepoint :-)

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icebraining
Meanwhile, non-relational databases go back at least to in '60s and predate
the relational model.

[http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-
nosql.h...](http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.html)

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omh
Somewhat related: Damien Katz has a brilliant blog post describing his
experiences rewriting the Lotus Notes formula engine, and dealing with the
"bugs". <http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html>

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reginaldo
There's a nice Stack Overflow podcast[1] on the same subject, where Damien
Katz talks a little about what he liked on Lotus Notes. I thought it was a
nice episode.

[1] <http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/>

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acomjean
I was a Notes programer at IBM over 10 years ago now, Notes is really
misunderstood. Oddly most people think of Notes as just an email/calendaring
tool and not for making useful databases for helping to collaborate/ run a
business.

Having put the Notes programming thing behind me, looking into NOSQL had me
thinking this looks familiar.

The notes platform at IBM was used to build out custom apps. I was a coop
student employee and built them a lot of custom apps. its amazing how those
custom tools can really help get stuff done.

You can also see why its not such a great email client (email is just another
database no matter how much customization they do). I used Notes as an email
client at another job and it has gotten better over the years, its still
clunky.

lotus-script left a lot to be desired.

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ollysb
I worked on an OLAP based product until 3 years ago. The source data was in a
lotus notes application that was updated by nearly 100 different researchers.
We imported the lotus notes data into our data warehouse every night. I can't
tell you how many times we had problems because data had been entered in a
different format. Schema-less might have it's place but I definitely wasn't
seeing the benefits on that job!

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marshray
Wow, I remember playing on the PLATO at U of I when I was a kid. This article
calls it a "mainframe", but my perception was that it was smaller than that.

I'd always thought PLATO was primary an educational computing experiment. Good
to know that people got other technology out of it too.

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rjzzleep
when was berkley db built? this whole nosql discussion bores me. not to
mention that graph databases which is also part of that nosql talk originated
in the 70s?

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klint
As noted in the OP, Berkeley DB was released in 1991 (see the sidebar). Neo4j,
a graph database, was also mentioned.

