[AmericanChopper]

> I can't wait for the day when we look back at NoSQL as the 'dancing sickness' of the IT world.

It does have some compelling use cases. It’s just relational data isn’t one of them. If you have a use case with a low potential for write contention, a tolerance for eventual consistency, a very simple data structure, and a high demand for read throughput, then it’s great. One area that I’ve seen it used with great success is content publishing. You have one author, perhaps an additional editor/proofreader, the content is one document (with perhaps one other related document, like an author bio), and hopefully you want thousands or perhaps millions of people to be able to get decent read performance. Another example could be pretty much anything you’d typically use a Materialized View for in a DB. You can compute the view in your RDBMS, periodically publish it to a document database, and then offload all read throughput to a better suited system.

NoSQL is usually used wrong imo, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to use it right. There’s valid use cases for graph databases and stream processing systems too. But they’re not hip enough to produce the same volume of highly questionable web apps.

[ajxs]

You're absolutely correct with the point about the materialised view use case. I wasn't going to labor the point going into extra detail in my post. The most successful use I've seen for NoSQL databases is aggregating complex relational data structures into a single document record periodically. You're entirely correct. It's not that the technology is inherently wrong ( in most cases, MongoDB is another story ) it's just the widespread misuse giving this technology a bad name.