The NoSQL Ecosystem

abartels writes 'Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as NoSQL databases. The fundamental problem is that relational databases cannot handle many modern workloads. There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Digg's (3 TB for green badges) or Facebook's (50 TB for inbox search) or eBay's (2 PB overall); per-server performance; and rigid schema design.'

Comments

Re:bad design

[munctional]

Ever heard of bloom filters? Sharding? Indexes? They are clearly not doing a table scan on 50gb of data every time you open your Facebook inbox.

You know, there's a certain point where people need to stop and actually think about the implimentation.

Um, they do. They regularly blog about their solutions to their problems and open source their solutions and contributions to existing projects. They come up with amazing solutions to their large scale problems. They're running over five million Erlang processes for their chat system!

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1

http://github.com/facebook

Also, when was the last time you tried to visit Facebook and it was down? They're doing quite well for people who need to stop and actually think about their "implimentation".

Re:hmm

[phantomfive]

The biggest problem is the cloud. A lot of cloud APIs don't allow full relational database access, so now it seems we are coming up with all these justifications for why we don't really need it. Notice that this blog is from a company pushing a cloud based solution.