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development

Enterprises Vs. Scale

March 10, 2010 19:50:23.769

I like this article by Dare Obasanjo on the relational DB/NoSQL divide - and his summary makes a great point, I think:

For these reasons I expect we'll see more large scale websites decide that instead of treating a SQL database as a denormalized key-value pair store that they would rather use a NoSQL database. However I also suspect that a lot of services who already have a sharded relational database + in-memory cache solution can get a lot of mileage from more judicious usage of in-memory caches before switching. This is especially true given that you still caches in front of your NoSQL databases anyway. There's also the question of whether traditional relational database vendors will add features to address the shortcomings highlighted by the NoSQL movement? Given that the sort of companies adopting NoSQL are doing so because they want to save costs on software, hardware and operations I somehow doubt that there is a lucrative market here for database vendors versus adding more features that the banks, insurance companies and telcos of the world find interesting.

I have to agree there - the needs of the enterprise seem to be diverging from the needs of the large scale website rapidly. Mind you, most websites are not large scale things - for every Digg or Twitter, there are tons of sites that get in the hundreds or low thousands of pageviews a day, and scale just fine with databases or even flat files. I think it remains to be seen whether the NoSQL movement will get much attention beyond the huge scale sites.

posted by James Robertson

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