‘Ugly’ MongoDB defies NoSQL death rumour
Someone clearly forgot to tell the MongoDB crowd that they lost. Ever since an anonymous poster on HackerNews called the MongoDB baby "ugly", I've been watching to see if MongoDB's early rise would taper off and fall.
After all, my own company, Nodeable, has had to switch from MongoDB to Cassandra due to some significant performance problems. And yet MongoDB continues its meteoric rise.
What gives? Why is MongoDB, and its corporate sponsor 10gen, doing well despite the technology's well-publicised problems? Read more...
Amazon Web Services launches managed database service
Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched a managed NoSQL database service that lets users easily launch a database and scale it up or down as needed.
The service meets the needs of web companies that are collecting, storing and processing an increasing amount of data. Without such a scalable database, AWS users would sometimes spend weeks forecasting and preparing their databases to perform during heavy usage periods, the company said. That's because traditional databases were not designed to scale quickly.
"Managing and scaling databases has always been the Achilles heal of web apps," said Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. To scale, companies could either buy bigger hardware or split databases across servers, he said. "Both approaches are increasingly complicated and expensive," he said. "Plus, there's a real shortage of technical people who have the specialized skills to do this." Read more...
SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild
Silicon Valley likes nothing more than to fetish the Next Big Technology Trend, be it cloud or NoSQL or scripting languages. The problem is that the real world moves much more slowly, and has very different considerations fueling its technology decisions. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the technology media's infatuation with NoSQL, even as the world plods along with SQL.
I was reminded of this by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who nicely shows that far from rendering SQL obsolete, the NoSQL crowd actually finds itself adopting SQL's query languages. As O'Grady notes: "The category might self-identify with its explicit rejection of the industry’s original query language, but the next step in NoSQL’s evolution will be driven in part by furious implementations of SQL’s children." Read more...