Enterprise NoSQL: Silver Bullet or Poison Pill? a presentation by Billy Newport (IBM).
Very informative comparison between SQL and NoSQL mindsets and what considerations lead to one or the other.
The “ah-ha” point in the presentation was Newport saying that for NoSQL, one has to ask what question do you want to have answered?
I am not entirely convinced by Newport’s argument that SQL supports arbitrary queries and that NoSQL design of necessity supports only a single query robustly.
Granting there are design choices that can point a NoSQL designer into a corner, but I don’t think it is fair to assume all NoSQL designers will make the same mistakes.
Or even that all NoSQL solutions obtain such limitations.
I don’t know of anything inherently query limiting about a graph database or even a hypergraph database architecture.
If you quickly point out sharding and it driving design to answer a particular question, my response is: And your question is?
How many arbitrary questions do you think there are for any given data set?
That would be an interesting research question.
How many unique questions (not queries) are asked of the average data set?
That is: unique queries != unique questions.
Application designers can design queries to match their application logic but that isn’t the same thing as a unique question.
Is that Newport’s concern (or at least part of it)? That NoSQL may put limits on the design of application logic? That could be good or bad.
[…] A post by Huan Liu to read after Billy Newport’s Enterprise NoSQL: Silver Bullet or Poison Pill? – (Unique Questions?) […]
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