Pinderkent

Over the past couple of years, we've been hearing more and more about the so-called "NoSQL" movement. In short, its adherents advocate the use of various data management systems that do away with some of the features that most relational database systems have come to offer, in favor of supposedly offering better performance for large data sets. The hype has become particularly strong lately, with it being revealed less than a month ago that Digg has started using Cassandra heavily. A few days later, a similar announcement was made regarding reddit.

There has been a fair amount of discussion regarding this topic. Dennis Forbes, for instance, discusses Digg's transition, and explains how properly using some of the most integral features of virtually all existing relational database systems, along with solid-state drives, can help alleviate many performance issues. We've also seen Ted Dziuba write about the risk and unnecessity of NoSQL-esque approaches for most situations, while Royans Tharakan has suggested the opposite to be true. Jeremy Zawodny describes NoSQL as "software Darwinism".

Regardless of how one personally feels about NoSQL or relational database systems, I can think of a few things that will likely hold true:

1. NoSQL techniques and systems will continue to get the sort of hype that misleads many developers and managers into thinking it's an approach that's much better than it actually is.
2. Numerous existing software systems currently using relational databases very successfully will be transitioned to using using a NoSQL approach.
3. Many new software systems will use NoSQL technologies, especially when it isn't necessary or even suitable to do so.
4. These new and modified systems will fail horribly. Expected performance gains won't materialize, data will be lost or badly mangled due to NoSQL's general lack of focus on data consistency, and codebases will be ruined by these transitions.

This is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it will ensure a lot of work for those of us who often get called in to deal with software blunders. But this isn't truly productive work, of course. It's mainly just fixing mistakes that shouldn't have been made in the first place. Techniques and software that worked for NoSQL users like Facebook, Google, Digg or reddit just won't work across the board, and it's quite unfortunate that so many developers and development managers won't realize this until it's far too late.