[forkandwait]

One of the best things about being a math major instead of a CS major is that it gives you a sense of history and how small the Next Big Thing probably is. One of the weird things about computer science and tech to me is that practitioners don't know what happened in 1980s, much less the theory that was developed over the last 150 years.

I would say that Boolean Algebra was actually an important advance, or the Fortran compiler (early 1960s), or a working system based on relational algebra (late 1970s). But proponents of XML/ Java/ Patterns/ Functional Programming/ Language XYZ/ NoSQL/ blah/ blah/ blah make it sound like their pet technology is a revolution, when it is usually an incremental change on tech/ theory that is very old.

And when it is an incremental change driven by corporate funded standards committees, you know it is going to be a complete cluster f*ck that is forced on the entire world by stupid IT managers with business degrees.

[mayank]

At least some aspects of NoSQL are novel from an algorithmic perspective, so it's unfair to dismiss it as a buzzword. The underlying gossiping protocols that enable no single point of failure are fairly recent developments (Chord is a recentish gossiping algorithm if I remember correctly). Just think about writing a distributed database system without any designated master/control nodes-- all kinds of fun algorithmic problems will pop out: randomized algorithms, random graphs, distributed indices, decentralized search, ...

[TimJYoung]

The problem is that the underlying distributed algorithms are not exclusively the domain of NoSQL systems and, likewise, one could easily use SQL with a key-value store, provided that one had access to a schema with which to resolve objects and their identifiers. Developers have been using non-relational data stores with SQL-based front ends for years.