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The Steady Rise Of NoSQL
By Qushawn Clark
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-10-04
Now that it is clear that Oracle is serious about offering NoSQL functionality for their systems, the movement may really come to the forefront of the development world.
For those of you who don't know much about NoSQL, it is a sort of umbrella term to describe database systems that do not require fixed table schemas. These systems also boast the ability to scale out (expand performance over multiple systems, like a cluster) instead of only being able to scale up (increasing the performance of a single system), which greatly reduces the cost of upgrading system performance. For the most part, they are either implemented as document-based systems (MongoDB) or key-value systems (Hbase) instead to traditional table structures. The real upside of using these systems is that they allow for vastly increased performance when performing many data-intensive operations. There are downsides to this method though, and that is why not many companies are jumping at the chance to adopt the new technology yet. The main reason that SQL is still the common choice is that it is reliable and has a nearly limitless number of support resources. Also, traditional SQL has a fairly common interface across the board, with only minor differences between various offerings. SQL is also based on the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) principles, which ensure that transactions are processed properly and reliably, while NoSQL does not yet offer this kind of reliability.
Now back to the subject of Oracle. The company has apparently scheduled demonstrations at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco for the Oracle NoSQL Database. While the name of the project isn't very flashy, it has created quite a bit of excitement for developers. This is because Oracle is attempting to bring customers the best of both worlds with this offering. They want to bring the speed of NoSQL with the rock-solid reliability of the traditional version. It is also known that this offering is based around the Memcached interface. According to Oracle, the reason that traditional SQL is so slow is that the ACID based query structure required for the complex queries commonly executed in SQL. Memchaced would turn SQL into a fast, reliable key-value lookup system. Everybody in the field of web development should definitely keep an ear open for more news about this.
About the Author:
Qushawn is a staff writer for the iEntry Network.
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