Two Answers to Why NoSQL

Long post about building a prototype application with two nice answers to the question: why NoSQL?

Well, cost for one. If I could afford Oracle I’d sooner use that than go NoSQL in all likelihood. I can’t afford it. Not even close. Oracle might as well charge me a small planet for their product. It’s great stuff, but out of reach. And what about sharding? Sharding a relational database sucks, and to try to hide the fact that it sucks requires you to pile on all kinds of other crap like query proxies, pools, and replication engines, all in an effort to make this beast do something it wasn’t meant to do: scale beyond a single box. All this stuff also attempts to mask the reality that you’ve also thrown your hands in the air with respect to at least 2 letters that make up the ACID acronym. What’s an RDBMS buying you at that point? Complexity.

And there’s another cost, by the way: no startup I know has the kind of enormous hardware that an enterprise has. They have access to commodity hardware. Pizza boxes. Don’t even get me started on storage. I’ve yet to see SSD or flash storage at a startup.

And yes,it is once again about complexity and operational costs.

via: http://yaydd.com/2010/06/29/brian-jones-brain-fried-over-nosql/