Thursday, December 24, 2009

Impact of NOSQL movement on the datastore vendors

Term #NOSQL (Not Only SQL) props up frequently these days, sometimes rivalling the traditional SQL-based datastores and on a few occasions augmenting it.
Both of these categories of datastores (databases) are no doubt quite different from each other, have different philosophies behind their implementation and most importantly, have different vendors.

Why don't the conventional SQL-based vendors grasp this opportunity and acquire another paradigm support under their belt? Although Oracle, a RDBMS vendor speaks up of supporting map-reduce model (a feature that is associated with NOSQL solutions), it however does not gives explicit constructs of endorsing the feature.

On the other hand, the NOSQL counterparts are emerging one after the other, solutions made in different languages, with slight variations. It seems like these NOSQL advocates turned vendors are trying to make the most of a hole found in the datastore market, and why shouldn't they capitalize on this silver opportunity? RDBMS vendors have left no room for the different DBMS paradigms to grow, and some of them have evolved into immense beasts.

It will be interesting to see how the different vendors, new and established ones will react to the new demands posed by the NOSQL movement. Only time will determine the leading marketshare holder for this new trend in data storage.

3 comments:

  1. IMHO, the NoSQL datastores are NOT that much quite different from each other, or have different philosophies behind their implementation.

    I think NoSQL databases are somewhat disguised object databases.

    See my post: Thinking about NoSQL databases (classification and use cases)

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  2. Thanks for the comments Dominique.

    I won't agree with the disguised object databases theory, I on the other hand think that they can be classified as one of the NOSQL datastores.

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  3. Well, my point with my disguised object database theory is twofold:

    - first, it's about to say NoSQL databases are not a completely new kind of database ! Indeed, object databases are very close to NoSQL databases, when one think in terms of data model and relaxed constraints.

    - secondly, while some developers have hard time to classify this new kind of databases, to think about them, I thought it's quite valuable to imagine them as (disguised) object databases, with relaxed constraints! Then, developers get a known mind model to deal with this new kind of databases.

    This being said, while object/NoSQL databases are close to each other, you can think their relationship within the opposite point of view, I mentionned previously ;-)

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