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Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'd suggest dropping the "movement" rhetoric unless you are truly promoting non-relational databases as the be-all end-all solution for object persistence for all applications and use cases.

Most advocates of technologies like Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant, Mongo, CouchDB, etc - don't seem to argue this, instead taking a much more responsible approach of suggesting organizations whose needs are best suited by non-RDBMSs check them out, rather than porting everything over whole-hog.

I suppose what I'm suggesting is that the "movement" frame doesn't match the mindset of most proponents of the paradigm. There's nothing political about it - it's just another (very awesome) technology to consider for certain cases.

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Not only is 'movement' needlessly pompous (it's dangerously close to also having a 'manifesto'), NoSQL is uninformative - the negation can apply to a lot of things including key-value stores, LINQ, post-it notes stuck to my monitor, etc.

Not just uninformative, but misleading too: there are many relational query languages besides SQL (e.g. Tutorial D). Is the conference about non-relational database technologies, or any alternative to SQL?

Hah, I threw LINQ in there figuring something like D would be too confusing/obscure. But your reminder sent me a-googling - wikipedia opens with: "D is a set of requirements proposed by Christopher J. Date and Hugh Darwen in their book The Third Manifesto "

So maybe NoSQL people need a movement after all. The relational people are at _least_ on their third manifesto. Lot of catching up to do!

In its vagueness it suggests knee-jerk criticism of RDBMSs, rather than any major advantage the alternatives have.

I went to a presentation about CouchDB recently, and afterward asked a couple questions about distribution, how views work, transactions, comparing its design and performance to RDBMSs, etc. It was immediately clear that the speaker didn't really understand the relational model at all (and he kept calling SQL "MySQL"). He couldn't answer several of my questions, but pointed out several times that the technology behind CouchDB is "way sexy". Now, I really like Postgres and SQLite, but I'm curious about the other systems because I'm a bit of a database nerd, and I was hoping he could explain what problems they solve, beyond some handwavey assertions about scaling and reassuring people with an aversion to SQL.

I'm not saying he's representative, but he comes to mind when I hear about a noSQL movement. People whose sole understanding of RDBMSs seems to have come from e.g. _PHP & MySQL For Dummies_, but keep hearing that SQL doesn't scale and noSQL databases are "the new hotness". Talk about the advantages of those systems compared to RDBMSs! And if you can't talk about any collective advantages they have, because they don't have much common ground (which is quite possible), then trying to present them collectively is just going to be confusing.

> _PHP & MySQL For Dummies_

That may be a pretty big part of the explanation. Most of the apps build on knowlegde rathered in that book, would probably benefit from being released from the constraints of SQL (and on the level of a blog or forum app SQL is more of a constraint than a benefit).

I dont agree. A movement doesn't have to be fundamentalistic. It doesn't have to propose that SQL is wrong in every case, only that SQL needn't be the first thing that comes to mind when you need to persist data, or the only thing.

The various NoSQL-solutions are quite different in nature, the only thing that really brings them together is that they're not SQL, and instead of each of them doing their own awareness raising campaigns, they probably do well to gang up. I don't even think they should change the name, it's not until now when they've created the NoSQL-umbrella that they're really getting some well-deserved attention.

There are plenty of solutions out there, pick the best one, or whichever one you just plain like more. And that might very well be SQL. Just don't pick SQL simply because that's the only solution you even know about. I think that's a message worth spreading.

It doesn't have to be, but if the only thing uniting them is agreement on a common enemy, then everything I know about human nature says that it's going to end up that way.

I would love to read a detailed, informed comparison of CouchDB, MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, Redis, etc. by somebody who knows enough about RDBMSs to realize they don't all suffer from MySQL's limitations. I'm curious what use cases they fit the best, etc., but most things I've read have only been familiar with one or two of them (understandable), or has been very heavily biased towards somebody's pet project or new favorite.

I'm with you, when I read "movement" I thought of "needless religion".

And the NoSQL is needlessly negative as well.

To be fair, "movement" was only used in the somewhat link-bait HN title. The conference website avoids any such rhetoric.

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