My name is Rick Negrin. I run the Product Management team at MemSQL, a scalable relational database. I recently wrote a blog on my thoughts regarding NoSQL vs. Relational Databases and I'd love to hear the community’s thoughts on this.
If you are a new distributed system and don't have Jepsen tests or a similar level of discussion on how your database handles partition events, then that tends to be harbingers of snake oil in distributed systems.
Granted I only did a quick search on CAP on your article, but the initial paragraph of your article didn't exactly invite further investigation or time investment.
If your "NoSQL" is just a single node MongoDB, then you should state that rather than your blanket statement. As is your categorization of "NoSQL" is unspecified and unqualified, leading me to believe this is a management-level article with little regard for the real issues in large-scale distributed databases, and why would I think your software also considers such problems?
And maybe for parent was enough, or if not it would be very interesting to know what is missing.
However, I need a way to cut it between people just using the free product and people actually supporting the project, so provide as paying feature something that the big company will require it seemed to me the only way to go.
Unfortunately, I don't have the capital nor the bandwidth to go with fully open source product and selling just support, which I don't believe is anyway a good business model.
If you were in my shoes, you would do something different?
Assuming nosql is for something very efficient or very scalable, I need some space to use it before I have to shell $$. There are many products where I have to pay before going on production.
If I were building a fast prototype I would not use a postgres box anymore but just a redis one.
If you need to cache data in a way more complex than just key->value you don't have too many alternatives at the moment.
If you want an easy and fast way to have an SQL engine in memory, again is not going to be simple.
If you need a separated database for every of your user there are no many alternatives that I am aware of.
It is definitely not a revolutionary product, but it has it's niche, any of the problems that I mentioned can be solved in a different way, but those different ways are quite complex.
I did thorough testing of Memsql two years ago but went with Aurora instead. Would love to see how the product evolved since (Spark and Streaming integration was just being rolled out at the time), but something tells me pricing will be a deal breaker.
"Free" being already hard to beat. The fact that you can't extensively test a solution is a real turn down for me (unless negotiating with commercials which is not nerds cup of tea).