[jhorey]

I agree that's a bit short sighted, but I think it's one of perspective. The mistake most people make is to believe that Oracle (and other relational DB vendors) are competing directly against the various NoSQL stores (this includes doc stores, scalable key-value stores, etc.). I don't think that's true. I think that relational databases are really competing against industry-specific SaaS. So instead of implementing their own database for inventory & sales, companies may opt to use a service. These SaaS companies, in turn, are more likely to adopt a variety of technologies (including NoSQL and relational). Since the SaaS companies serve more than a single company, they're also more likely to adopt easily scalable technology like Cassandra. So fewer businesses will need to purchase databases (of any sort), but the ones that do will have greater scalability needs.

[threeseed]

NoSQL is absolutely competing with Oracle and other relational DB vendors. You are seeing it today with the valuations for companies like Mongo or DataStax. SaaS is hardly a big enough market compared to say every enterprise. And surely the companies listed on the client pages agree with me.

And people forget something important with SaaS. Data sovereignty. Here in Australia for example there are many enterprise companies who are forbidden from using ANYTHING that is hosted in the US due to the grey legal area e.g. Patriot Act. So in-house databases are absolutely still here to stay.

[jhorey]

It's interesting, my experience with companies here in the U.S. (mainly SMBs) are that they feel much more comfortable using a SaaS compared to adopting an internal NoSQL store. Granted most of these companies aren't highly technical, but I suspect for them using a SaaS is easy and doesn't require much internal expertise. Adopting a new NoSQL store though may require training, etc. Of course I concede that things may be different in larger enterprises and companies outside the U.S.

I would bet, however, that most of the clients that do business with Mongo or DataStax still intend on using/maintaining a relational system. I haven't really encountered many companies that's decided to completely dump their relational systems in favor of something else.

[redwood]

Agree. Where you see nonrelational popping up analogously is particularly in new SaaS shops, many of which aim to take some Oracle's pie.