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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.'
The performance claims will probably be disputed by Oracle whizzes. However, the "rigid schema" claim bothers me. RDBMS can be built that have a very dynamic flavor to them. For example, treat each row as a map (associative array). Non-existent columns in any given row are treated as Null/empty instead of an error. Perhaps tables can also be created just by inserting a row into the (new) target table. No need for explicit schema management. Constraints, such as "required" or "number" can incrementally be added as the schema becomes solidified. We have dynamic app languages, so why not dynamic RDBMS also? Let's fiddle with and stretch RDBMS before outright tossing them. Maybe also overhaul or enhance SQL. It's a bit long in the tooth.
More at:
http://geocities.com/tablizer/dynrelat.htm
(And you thought geocities was de
Table-ized A.I.
I'm a huge PostgreSQL fan and took classes in formal database theory in college. I'm saying this as someone who understands and thoroughly appreciates relational databases: I'm starting to love schema-less systems. I've only been playing with CouchDB for a few weeks but can certainly see what such stores bring to the table. Specifically, a lot of the data I've stored over the years doesn't neatly map to a predefined tuple, and while one-to-one tables can go a long way toward addressing that, they're certainly not the most elegant or efficient or convenient representation of arbitrary data.
I'm certainly not going to stop using an RDBMS for most purposes, but neither am I going to waste a lot of time trying to shoehorn an everchanging blob into one. Each tool has its place and I'm excited to see what niche this ecosystem evolves to fill.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yes it does (look through 50TB of data), and how would you design it? It has to access all of your friends and find their postings. Robert Johnson gave an excellent talk on facebook's design two weeks ago at OOPSLA (it should be in the ACM digital library soon). He stated that there is no clear segregation of data, the (friend) network is too connected and extracting groups of friends isn't possible. Basically they have a huge mysql farm with memcached on top. Loading an inbox will hit multiple servers (maybe even a different server for each of your friends) across the farm.
We didn't start with relationship databases. RDBMSes were responses to the seductive but unmanageable navigational databases that preceded them. There were good reasons for moving to relational databases, and those reasons are still valid today.
Computer Science doesn't change because we're writing in Javascript now instead of PL/1.
The first sign for me that someone is selling bullshit is when they try to act like this is some never before seen problem, when in fact there is a good four decades of research of database optimization.
Your point is valid, but I think there is more to it. And the problems these solutions try to solve are quite old too. For example:
Ever tried to design a database, but got the requirement that you should be able to reconstruct the modification history? It boils down to not deleting (ever), and 'deleted' flag fields and other uglyness. A multi-version relational database would be nice, you actually don't need modification/delete operations in this scenario, just 'updates' that add to the previous status. CouchDB does append operations.
In some cases you may not need a complete SQL database, just key->value relations, but have them scaling very well. http://project-voldemort.com/ states: "It is basically just a big, distributed, persistent, fault-tolerant hash table." Then they state that they provide horizontal scalability, which MySQL doesn't (OTOH, we should really look at Oracle for these things).
And you can't really say MapReduce/Hadoop is pointless.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
You laugh, but the things I see done in Excel on a daily basis in production environments getting a LOT of work done are a testament to it's power. It is one of the best rapid application development platforms in existance. People with no CS background programming away in a functional style and getting shit done and not even realising they are programming. It could be so much better but it's still the best of breed. Any yes I have tried, and seen others try, O.O. et al. Forget it. Lets not go down that worn old road.