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Discussion on: Any NoSQL true believers out there?

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katiekodes profile image
Katie • Edited

That's absolutely preposterous.

Good, attention-getting marketing, though. Can't blame MongoDB.

But if you have a boss actually influenced by an ad like this, make sure they and you have both read Dan McCreary and Ann Kelly's Making Sense of NoSQL.

Each major flavor of non-relational database has something it's good at (and plain-old relational databases in turn have things they're good at). This book will explain why.

They basically break databases down into 5 major types in use today:

  1. "Relational" (This is your classic FileMakerPro / Microsoft Acces / Oracle / SQL Server / MySQL / PostgreSQL database. The one you think of as a database. From a beginner's perspective, you can think of it as a bunch of Excel spreadsheets that cross-reference each other, and each record in a "spreadsheet" has a defined set of values you're allowed to fill in (think of the column headers.))
  2. "Key-Value"
  3. "Columnar" (A specialized form of key-value database. Be sure to learn how, plus why it's different enough to get its own name.)
  4. "Document" (A specialized form of key-value database. Be sure to learn how, plus why it's different enough to get its own name.)
  5. "Graph" (Some versions are a specialized form of key-value database. Be sure to learn how, plus why it's still different enough to get its own name.)

Interestingly, from what I hear at Salesforce talks, they present a user interface to their customers that, for all practical purposes, gives those customers a traditional "relational database," but on the back end, Salesforce has been migrating from storing what actually goes into those "databases" away from a relational database of their own and into a ... I think it was a columnar database, but I wouldn't swear to it.