Google has been running its entire infrastructure on a NoSQL database for years.
Perhaps folks need to keep some open mind and see if that works instead of dismissing a new trend?
Yes, keep an open mind, but please do not use a database that has a history of just losing data in mission critical software.
> there is no need to structure the data into tables and schema does not need to be enforced at the DB level.
There is no need to, just like your car doesn't need safety belts to function.
A database scheme is mostly a safety mechanism as it will prevent you from doing something stupid.
> Google has been running its entire infrastructure on a NoSQL database for years.
Do you have a source for this claim? I would be inclined to believe that the data for my Google account sits in a relational database somewhere.
I’m skeptical about this - Google’s entire infrastructure is so large that surely they must be using a wide variety of db technologies?
I took a databases course that did mention that part of the Google search infrastructure runs on a tailor-made NoSQL technology, but it wasn’t really a doc-based approach, it was more akin to a relational DB but with flexible columns (can’t remember the details sorry).
At any rate I don’t feel that this is any vindication for NoSQL, as Google builds much of its underlying tech from scratch and its hardly comparable to the out-of-the-box solutions that the rest of us, even massive corporations like HSBC, have to work with.
"Bigtable development began in 2004[3] and is now used by a number of Google applications, such as web indexing,[4] MapReduce, which is often used for generating and modifying data stored in Bigtable,[5] Google Maps,[6] Google Book Search, "My Search History", Google Earth, Blogger.com, Google Code hosting, YouTube,[7] and Gmail.[8]"
"Bigtable is one of the prototypical examples of a wide column store. It maps two arbitrary string values (row key and column key) and timestamp (hence three-dimensional mapping) into an associated arbitrary byte array. It is not a relational database and can be better defined as a sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map."
NoSQL has proven to be hard to get right than was first assumed and at the same time RDBMS’es have improved and adopted many ideas from the NoSQL world faster than expected, often with better results.
What’s no clear from the article is why MongoDB was picked, so maybe there’s something that made it the obvious choice, it’s just hard to see what the might be.
SQL has been around since birth of computing, give NoSQL some time.
"NoSQL has proven to be hard to get right than was first assumed"
Nothing has been proven, again give it a chance, SQL had years of optimization.
Also, no need to downvote if you like SQL or your job depends on it, or that is all you know, just debate with reason and evidence, I've used both and open to change my mind with evidence and case studies which we don't have many yet and folks here predicting doomsday to HBSC without keeping an open mind.
The other statements are not even well reasoned, you read things like "this is madness" or "they up to disaster", "lol just lol", "they're gone", not explaining why. You would expect better arguments from the folks here.
Some pointed flaws in the design or implementation, and I'd argue with time and money, it will get sorted out, again SQL had years optimization and research.
I'd go further, I'd argue is that NoSQL is more flexible and easier to work with than SQL and I think it is a good thing that large organizations are given it a real try, so we have a large scale case studies, instead of completely dismiss the effort as a failure from the get-go.
You would? Why?
You don't think I should keep that expectation?