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An open letter to the NoSQL community

This content is 14 years old and may not reflect reality today nor the author’s current opinion. Please keep its age in mind as you read it.

Following some discussion on Twitter today I posted this thread to the nosql-discussion group. You can see the outcome for yourself (essentially, and unsurprisingly I might add, “please feel free to take your software and call it whatever you want“).

While I don’t want to mess with their momentum (it’s a good cause, if branded with an unfortunate name) this isn’t the first time the issue’s been raised and I doubt it will be the last. I do however think that “no SQL” is completely missing the point and that the core concern is trading consistency for scalability. At the end of the day developers and users will deploy what is most appropriate for the task at hand.

There’a already been a question about alternatives to SQL, and knowing how Structured Query Language (SQL) came to be (consider the interfaces before it existed and compare that to what we have today) I figure it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself and we end up creating something like Cloud Query Language (CQL) (a deliberate play on words). The closer this is to ANSI SQL the better it will be, both in terms of technology reuse and of the bags of bones that need to understand how it works… for the same reason the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) tries very hard to be as close as possible to HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sam Johnston
Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 3:33 PM
Subject: An open letter to the NoSQL community
To: NoSQL

Afternoon NoSQLers,

I write to you as a huge fan of next generation databases, but also as someone who doesn't associate in any way with the "NoSQL" moniker. I don't particularly care for SQL and appreciate the contrived contention it creates, but I think it misses the point somewhat and alienates people like myself who might otherwise have been drawn to the project.

I assume that by "NoSQL" we're referring to the next generation of [generally cloud-based] databases such as Google's BigTable, Amazon's SimpleDB, Facebook's Cassandra, etc., in which case the issue is more the underlying model (e.g. ACID vs BASE), where we are ultimately trading consistency for scalability.

To me this has nothing to do with the query language (which would still arguably be useful for many applications and which may as well be [something like] SQL, albeit adapted), nor the relational (as opposed to navigational) nature of the data (which is still the case today - it's just represented as pointers rather than separate "relation" tables), and to focus on either attribute is missing the point. This is particularly true with today's announcement of Amazon RDS.

Perhaps it's too late already, but I'd like to think we can come up with a more representative name to which everyone can associate (and which isn't so scary for fickle enterprise customers). There's already been a couple of decent suggestions, including alt.db, db-ng, NRDB[MS], etc.

Sam
http://samj.net/