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Quite frankly, the anti-NoSQL-as-a-term is getting a bit tiring. As someone who has been working on "NoSQL" systems since 2000, I have been extremely thankful that there is finally a broad-based movement exploring alternative datastore architectures. It used to be extremely depressing to have discussions with fellow engineers on the benefits of alternative architectures and for them to simply reject it on the grounds that "SQL DBMS must be the best since they've had decades of work behind them". At the very best, someone might have been radical enough to contemplate the use of an Object Database. In contrast, thanks to the NoSQL movement and the exploration of alternative models that it has encouraged, the quality of discussions is extremely different today. More and more engineers are aware of the benefits and issues with various models and are much more open to alternatives. So when I say that I am extremely thankful to whoever coined the damn term and for efforts like NoSQL Summer, I really mean it. It has really improved my quality of life. Now I get that "NoSQL" isn't a 100% accurate term. But what marketing term ever is? Take something like AJAX — most "AJAX" apps have never dealt with XML, yet the term has been extremely useful. It helped solidify a broad-based effort to explore using JavaScript and thanks to the "AJAX movement" of a few years ago, we now have XHR in all modern browsers and awesome libraries like jQuery! The real issue as I see it is that projects are keen to differentiate and are thus reacting to being lumped together with extremely different systems. Now no-one who understands the technologies is ever going to compare the likes of Redis, CouchDB, Neo4j, Cassandra and Hadoop as equivalents, but it is understandable that projects are afraid of being considered equivalent by those who are simply choosing a NoSQL system for their project without understanding the differences. This follows onto another issue — a leader (or two) often emerge once a new domain has been established and the "smaller" projects are cautious of being sidelined by "big boys" like Cassandra/MongoDB/Hadoop. To continue with the AJAX example, in the early days there used to be a whole bunch of options regarding JavaScript libraries: Prototype, jsolait, MochiKit, MooTools, jQuery, Dojo, etc. In contrast, nowadays, jQuery is the default choice for the vast majority of developers. I don't think that there is such a clear winner in the NoSQL field yet. In fact, given the massive fragmentation, we probably haven't even heard of the final winner yet! That is not to say that the concerns of the various projects aren't totally valid. But the issue is not with the "NoSQL" term but rather with differentiation and understanding — both of which can only be solved by better communication. Phrases like "Online Request Processing Systems (ORPS)" or even "Alternative Datastores" aren't exactly catchy marketing terms. NoSQL may not be perfect, but it's here and it's more than good enough. So can we please stop bashing it and focus on coming up with clearer differentiators? Thanks! |
