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What’s your take on RDBMS and NoSQL?
My take is that application developers have belatedly but correctly concluded that an RDBMS is not the best tool for every application. For example, relational algebra, relational calculus, and SQL are not the best tools for graph problems. As another example, weblogs are non-transactional and don’t benefit from the ACID properties of the RDBMS. Amazon created the Dynamo key-value store for a highly specific use case. From the Dynamo white paper: “Customers should be able to view and add items to their shopping cart even if disks are failing, network routes are flapping, or data centers are being destroyed by tornados. … There are many services on Amazon’s platform that only need primary-key access to a data store. … Simple read and write operations to a data item that is uniquely identified by a key. Data is stored as binary objects (i.e., blobs) identified by unique keys. No operations span multiple data items and there is no need for relational schema. … The operation environment is assumed to be non-hostile and there are no security related requirements such as authentication and authorization.”
What’s your take?
P.S. I wasn’t always of this opinion because, until very recently, I had not studied NoSQL technologies. But my favorite quote is the one on consistency from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word … bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. … A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. … Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” (http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm)
However, I don’t give a free pass to the NoSQL camp. I believe that most of the problems that the NoSQL camp is trying to solve, with the sole exception of graph problems, could have been solved within the framework of relational theory. Since the relational camp couldn’t (or wouldn’t) solve the problems, the NoSQL camp came up with their own solutions and threw out the baby (relational theory) along with the bathwater (the perceived deficiencies of relational theory). My topic for the Great Lakes Oracle Conference is therefore “Soul-searching for the relational camp: Why NoSQL and Big Data have momentum.” (https://www.neooug.org/gloc/accepted-presentations.aspx)
NoSQL and Oracle, Sex and Marriage
In a post entitled “NoSQL and Oracle, Sex and Marriage,” Cary Millsap asks why NoSQL technologies are suddenly so popular. My take is that application developers have belatedly but correctly concluded that an RDBMS is not the best tool for every application. For example, relational algebra, relational calculus, and SQL are not the best tools for graph problems. As another example, weblogs are non-transactional and don’t benefit from the ACID properties of the RDBMS. Amazon created the Dynamo key-value store for a highly specific use case. From the Dynamo white paper: “Customers should be able to view and add items to their shopping cart even if disks are failing, network routes are flapping, or data centers are being destroyed by tornados. … There are many services on Amazon’s platform that only need primary-key access to a data store. … Simple read and write operations to a data item that is uniquely identified by a key. Data is stored as binary objects (i.e., blobs) identified by unique keys. No operations span multiple data items and there is no need for relational schema. … The operation environment is assumed to be non-hostile and there are no security related requirements such as authentication and authorization.”
If you have a different take, I am very interested in hearing it.
P.S. I wasn’t always of this opinion because, until very recently, I had not studied NoSQL technologies. But my favorite quote is the one on consistency from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word … bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. … A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. … Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” (http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm)
However, I don’t give a free pass to the NoSQL camp. I believe that most of the problems that the NoSQL camp is trying to solve, with the sole exception of graph problems, could have been solved within the framework of relational theory. Since the relational camp couldn’t (or wouldn’t) solve the problems, the NoSQL camp came up with their own solutions and threw out the baby (relational theory) along with the bathwater (the perceived deficiencies of relational theory). My topic for the Great Lakes Oracle Conference is therefore “Soul-searching for the relational camp: Why NoSQL and Big Data have momentum.” (https://www.neooug.org/gloc/accepted-presentations.aspx)
Oracle 12c Gives Fresh Life to the Relational Database Movement
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco (April 1, 2013) – In a dramatic move calculated to give fresh life to the moribund relational database movement, the latest version of Oracle Corporation’s flagship database has eliminated the famous “join penalty” by making it possible to store rows from multiple relational tables in the same database block. There are two flavors of the feature: hash clusters and indexed clusters. Database aficionado Iggy Fernandez has this to say about the feature: “Even Homer Simpson and his Springfield buddies are aware that Oracle Database supports the relational model. However, it is not universally known that Oracle Database 12c also supports the document model. Hash clusters and indexed clusters are critical building blocks of Document/Relational duality, an extension of the physical data independence proposed by Dr. Edgar Codd (1923–2003), the creator of the relational model. Document/Relational duality means that data in an Oracle 12c database can be physically stored in one of the two ways—either as documents or as rows in tables depending on the primary use case—without compromising the ability to expose and manipulate data in the other way. Naysayers will no longer be able to call Oracle Corporation’s commitment to Document/Relational duality into question.” Iggy then ecstatically began singing the 1960s hit song “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven,” a dead giveaway to his age.
Document/Relational duality means that data in an Oracle Database can be physically stored in one of the two ways—either as documents or as rows in tables depending on the primary use case—without compromising the ability to expose and manipulate data in the other way.
For more information about hash clusters and indexed clusters, please refer to the Oracle Concepts manual.
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