The NoSQL movement is growing, but what is it?

I think that NoSql is a very regrettable name for an interesting movement. I got a response from someone who appears to have been involved in the early stages

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=967882

"...NoSQL was never meant to be a "movement". We were taking a trip to the Bay Area from London and we wanted to meet up with some of the guys who were working on scalable non-relational data stores. We planned a one-day conference and someone suggested naming it NoSQL. It was just a tongue-in-cheek name, until someone came along and decided it was a "movement".

I can see how this happens. Unfortunately, a name like "NoSql" is going to get people to come to the defense of Sql in many ways that were never really part of the "NoSql" concept. For instance, my initial reaction was a defense of the language and its (in my opinion) remarkably effective way of structuring and managing complex relationships in data. However, it appears that most of the "NoSql" folk aren't making any claim to the contrary.

NoSql, I think, is more about avoiding rdbms's as a default data store when you don't really need sql and are experiencing scalability issues. In that case, it probably does make sense.

"NotAlwaysSql" might have been a more descriptive name, but doesn't really have the same impact... sometimes this is deliberate (get the impact of a controversial term, but then define that term as something much easier to defend), but in this case, I don't think it was deliberate, I think it was something that got away from them.

I really love key/value stores for things they work really well for -- caching comes immediately to mind -- but I would really, really, really not want to support $FOO university's 300 table, ~2,000 column, ER-diagram-occupies-an-entire-wall system if it were written in a key/value store.