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A Survey of NoSQL
Jul. 18th, 2011 01:38 pmFor reasons I shan't get into, today is looking like a catching-up-on-my-technical-reading sort of day. So to start off, here's an excellent article that I've had sitting in my backlog for well over a year: a detailed survey of NoSQL.
For those who haven't looked into it, "NoSQL" is a catch-all term referring to databases that aren't conventionally relational. This isn't a panacea -- sometimes, you really do want a relational DB -- but the article lists some of the numerous reasons why you often might *not* want one. (Mostly having to do with scaling: it's just plain hard to scale a relational DB up to gigantic traffic.) It then does a deep-dive survey of the categories of NoSQL DBs, the ways they differ, and the products and open-source systems available in each category.
Neat stuff. For ordinary apps, it's largely over-thought, but if you're trying to build something that might scale to Internet sizes (with millions of transactions a day), then it's worth thinking about and understanding this landscape...
For those who haven't looked into it, "NoSQL" is a catch-all term referring to databases that aren't conventionally relational. This isn't a panacea -- sometimes, you really do want a relational DB -- but the article lists some of the numerous reasons why you often might *not* want one. (Mostly having to do with scaling: it's just plain hard to scale a relational DB up to gigantic traffic.) It then does a deep-dive survey of the categories of NoSQL DBs, the ways they differ, and the products and open-source systems available in each category.
Neat stuff. For ordinary apps, it's largely over-thought, but if you're trying to build something that might scale to Internet sizes (with millions of transactions a day), then it's worth thinking about and understanding this landscape...