It’s the End of the World As We Know It (NoSQL Edition)

Some good comments on Michael Stonebraker’s paper ☞ The End of an Architectural Era (pdf):

The provocatively named paper is simply a description of a system, designed from scratch for modern OLTP requirements and the demonstration that this system gives better performance than traditional RDBMS on OLTP type load. The conclusion is that since RDBMS can’t even excel at OLTP – it must be destined for the garbage pile. I’ll ignore the fact that hybrid systems are far from extinct and look at the paper itself.

While it’s kind of difficult to disagree with Michael Stonebraker, I still believe that some of the design considerations in that paper are not really requirements, but just based on his work on HStore and VoltDB. Take for example the “the OLTP database should fit entirely in-memory” or “the OLTP database should be single threaded”, these sound like implementation details and not as functional requirements.

via: http://www.pythian.com/news/14199/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-nosql-edition/