"Slacker DBs" vs. Old-Guard DBs

snydeq writes "Non-relational upstarts — tools that tack the letters 'db' onto a 'pile of code that breaks with the traditional relational model' — have grabbed attention in large part because they willfully ignore many of the rules that codify the hard lessons learned by the old database masters. Doing away with JOINs and introducing phrases like 'eventual consistency,' these 'slacker DBs' offer greater simplicity and improved means of storing data for Web apps, yet remain toys in the eyes of old guard DB admins. 'This distinction between immediate and eventual consistency is deeply philosophical and depends on how important the data happens to be,' writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner, who let down his old-guard leanings and tested slacker DBs — Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine, and Persevere — to see how they are affecting the evolution of modern IT."

Comments

slashdot insult? :(

[FlashBuster3000]

FTA: "The world won't end if some snarky, anonymous comment on Slashdot disappears."
What? Nothing more important than anonymous slashdot trolls to moderate :/

Mod this down

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the article says, "The world won't end if some snarky, anonymous comment on Slashdot disappears."

Well, it's like...

[oldhack]

Either is cool with me, as long they are cool and takes care of business, you know what I am saying?

It's all good.

Re:Hackers.

[TheSpoom]

If I could do a security audit on a website by flying through a psychedelic 3D futurescape, I might just become a workaholic.

Re:Normalization doesn't exist to save disk space

[Hognoxious]

You don't want to store the same data in multiple places.

But if one of them is wrong, you can check the others and correct it.

My boss - a lead senior senior lead developer from Android Whorehouse & Douche - several years back, when I tried explaining "why I'd missed some fields out of one of the tables".

Re:Normalization doesn't exist to save disk space

[mooingyak]

But if one of them is wrong, you can check the others and correct it.

My boss - a lead senior senior lead developer from Android Whorehouse & Douche - several years back, when I tried explaining "why I'd missed some fields out of one of the tables".

I was about to post something explaining to you why that's bad, and then I reread your post and the whooshing noise around me quieted down.

SELECT * FROM SNARKY_COMMENTS

[billstewart]

Can't quite fit the whole query into the title box, but if you were using one of those databases that Wayner's article talked about, you'd be able to query and find out if you were first...

Re:Laziness Rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for validating the OP comments....

Re:I feel old

[__aasqbs9791]

I was listening to the radio (didn't pay attention the the station it was on) one day and generally liking the music I was listening to on it. Then the station ID came across between songs. It was the "oldies" station. I suddenly felt like I needed a cane (or perhaps a walker). Why does that happen? And is it going to happen every 10 years or so? I don't think I can take too many more of those moments.

Old vs. New Simple DB's

[billstewart]

Wayner's usually a good writer, and did some good theoretical-computer-science work back in the day, but this article was too short to answer the questions he asks at the beginning, and he mostly highlighted the new shiny things from big ASPs, which is generally what Infoworld wants.

I'm particularly disappointed that while he referred to the name and history of Berkeley DB, aka Sleepycat, aka Oracle Renamed-foo, he didn't actually talk about using it. (OTOH, Infoworld did review one version of it in 2005.) I no longer have my 4.1BSD manual on the shelf, but it was useful if you wanted something faster than using grep/sed/awk/look on tab-separated text files (which were the canonical Unix database format, and what I normally used for databases.)

These days if I want a lightweight database, I usually just put build tables in Excel, and then bitch about how it doesn't have a join or even decent text-editing and filtering capabilities, and occasionally have to save it as a CSV file and install vim on Yet Another Work-owned Windows box so I can get some bloody work done. I supposed if Excel did have a join function there'd be fewer people buying MS Access...

Re:*mods article -1, Flamebait*

[Just Some Guy]

You seem to imply there was more to the story than the summary. This confuses me.

Re:Normalization doesn't exist to save disk space

[Hognoxious]

Total failure to understand the situation. You, I mean he, didn't understand the concept of "factoring out" common information - say, the customer details on an order - from the variable per item data - product code, quantity.

What he, er, you appear to be talking about is natural vs surrogate keys.