[ghshephard]

NoSQL = "We don't have to solve every damn Database problem with Oracle 10G, despite what our (brought up in enterprise IT) tech-services group keeps insisting to our COO every time the engineering group rolls out a new product that uses something different. It does mean that we can't rely on the crutch of (1) optimizer/statistics gather, (2) RAC, (3) Dataguard, (4) MASSIVE spindle group SANs w/ vertically scaled Sun M9000/IBM P795 Database Server and our small group of DBAs to solve all of our query, HA, DR and scaling problems, but instead have to shift the responsibility for solving those problems onto the Engineering team, which may or may not make sense depending on whether we believe our core competence should be solving those problems with engineering instead of (1),(2),(3), (4).

NoSQL is a phrase that means "use the right tool for the job" instead of just throwing endless amounts of money at low-risk, but 100x (1000x?) more expensive solutions that will eventually fail at internet scale load anyways.

NoSQL means taking on more of the engineering risk, rather than shifting it to your vendor.

[nailer]

Oracle Coherance seems pretty NoSQL too (sharded key value store, no or very slow JOINs) too BTW. So even the 'Oracle guys' seem to be adopting this approach for some apps...