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I'm getting more and more annoyed by these kind of articles. Why are people talking about NoSQL and relational databases as if they're solving the same problems

I'm getting more and more annoyed by these kind of articles. Why are people talking about NoSQL and relational databases as if they're solving the same problems? There is no "NoSQL" mindset to fight against, and there is no "RDBMS" mindset to fight against: the only mindset to fight against, is a mindset that says a silver bullet exists.

henriklied 17y ago
I do not have the vocabulary to explain how much I agree with you. Haven't we gotten to the point where people understand what "use the tool that fits your need" means?
dagheti 17y ago
Your criticism of this article is off the mark (though it may apply to other articles). The entire point of this article is that he is trying to replicate the exact same problem that Digg was reporting using a different RDBMS and discussing what that means. Maybe his numbers are off and his technique is wrong, but this article isn't making a one-sized-fits-all mistake.
- tristan_juricek 17y ago
  Uh, using language like "bottom-feeder RDBMS" and saying that an engineering team is using it "horribly incorrectly on clearly comically deficient hardware" makes this article highly biased, and trollish. It's pretty clear that this guy things Digg is a bunch of idiot engineers - I mean, why else allude to "rudimentary comp. sci. knowledge"? These articles might have a central point, but when it's surrounded by a bunch of opinion, it like watching TV news (e.g., Fox News). The real information gets drowned out.
  - wvenable 17y ago
    MySQL is a good product, but it does have some significant failings when it comes to getting top-notch performance out of indexes. Digg's description of their entire setup seems a bit unusual -- from how they've defined their tables to their query methods. It seems at least somewhat likely that they were not making optimal use of their technology. I'd be curious what the traffic/content difference between Digg and Stackoverflow is. Stackoverflow uses an architecture very similar to what Forbes proposes here and they have plenty of capacity on rather unremarkable hardware.
    - jbellis 17y ago
      I would bet that SO has several orders of magnitude less traffic than Digg.
      - ratsbane 17y ago
        Looking at Alexa's numbers for a rough comparison of pageviews it looks like Digg gets about 10x as many as SO: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com#trafficstats http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com#trafficstats
        gill_bates 17y ago
        So while SO runs on a minimal amount of closet-room hardware efficiently and without incident, Digg has heroics and clusters and scale-outs and all sorts of drama to handle just 10x the load? I'm not sure what angle you were coming from, but that makes Digg look like clowns.
        skorgu 17y ago
        Not saying that Digg aren't clowns but the traffic balance makes a huge difference. It's not implausible that Digg has an enormously bigger fraction of writes to reads than SO does which changes the scaling dynamics considerably. Edit: To expand I'd imagine SO serves a lot of static "how do I" google hits for logged-out users which is about as easy to serve as it gets. Digg puts a higher emphasis on the logged in experience and commenting which reduces the ability to cache.
  - Devilboy 17y ago
    MySQL is at the bottom of the pile of what qualifies as "RDBMS" so the bottom-feeder comment might be trollish but it's not flat out wrong.
  - scotty79 17y ago
    Why thinking that other people are stupid is such prevalent? It leads to so many misunderstandings.
CWIZO 17y ago
I agree with you! And on that note I would like to see more articles that describe problems that NoSQL stuff is good at. This is probably the main reason why there is so much confusion. Everybody is talking about how great cassandra/mongodb/couchdb/... is, but nobody tells you where and how to actually use it.
- drhodes 17y ago
  What I'd like to see are articles that discuss design techniques. Like, how to incrementally develop a key store db without inconsistencies? There's no schema so .. I'm worried about partial records after adding values to the non-schema. First these addresses didn't have a zipcode field, but now they do. What about relationships between records, isn't there going to be redundant data? What if the user changes their email in the account record, do I have to manually update their contact record? This is what foreign keys are for. OMG, Where am I ... Where's the exit? We're all gonna die! That's basically what I go through every time I think about it. It's a big scary fully loaded gnarly nested hash table aimed directly at my foot.
  - CWIZO 17y ago
    That's exactly how I feel, and so far I haven't read a single thing that would clear this things up for me. And I read pretty much everything about this topic that I get my hands on. I'm really egger to learn this stuff, to know where to use it, so I could use it in my projects where appropriate. Somebody who truly gets NoSQL and has use it, should really really write something on this subject.
- Nelson69 17y ago
  Yes! That's the same stuff I've been smelling. I look at stuff like documents Google has published and Hadoop and I do think to myself that map-reduce and some of the massively distributed stuff could potentially teach RDBMs some new tricks. Then I see these articles and they're all about someone converting a blog from MySQL to MongoDB. I'd love to see the technical details of how Digg used MySQL, why it was slow and why NoSQL is better, how they use it. The more of this I see and the less real information the more I think they didn't know what they were doing in the first place.
wvenable 17y ago
> Why are people talking about NoSQL and relational databases as if they're solving the same problems? If you can switch from one to the other and back again, how are they not solving the same problems?
- josephruscio 17y ago
  Just because you can pound a screw into the wall with a hammer doesn't mean it solves the same problem as a screwdriver.
  - wvenable 17y ago
    And just because you've got a clever saying doesn't mean we aren't just dealing the two different kinds of screw drivers. That's the whole point here.
    - rosser 17y ago
      Just because there's overlap in the problem domains the two classes of tools can be used for does not make them fully interchangeable. If you use a NoSQL tool for transaction processing, you're probably doing it wrong; if you use an RDBMS to house vast amounts of schema-less data, you're probably also doing it wrong. Yes, exceptions exist for every rule, but in the grand Venn diagram of applicability of NoSQL and RDBMSen, there are huge areas that don't overlap. You ignore those areas at your own peril.
      - wvenable 17y ago
        In this case, is the data schema-less? They started with a defined schema and maybe now they don't. Your data defines the tool, but you define the data. I can store JSON in a MySQL column and you'd say I'm using the wrong tool. But I decided to define a schema instead, then I'm using the right tool? It's pretty arbitrary. Some requirements do lean one way or the other but most of the time there's not much of a difference. The areas where clearly an RDBMS is the correct solution or where NoSQL is clearly the correct solution aren't an issue. I think there are huge areas that do overlap. NoSQL is being advocated in far more situations than just where it's clearly the correct solution.
nhebb 17y ago
NoSQL vs. RDBMS debates are like traffic accidents. I slow down to look, but I'm happy I'm not involved.

henriklied 17y ago

I do not have the vocabulary to explain how much I agree with you. Haven't we gotten to the point where people understand what "use the tool that fits your need" means?

dagheti 17y ago

Your criticism of this article is off the mark (though it may apply to other articles). The entire point of this article is that he is trying to replicate the exact same problem that Digg was reporting using a different RDBMS and discussing what that means. Maybe his numbers are off and his technique is wrong, but this article isn't making a one-sized-fits-all mistake.

tristan_juricek 17y ago
Uh, using language like "bottom-feeder RDBMS" and saying that an engineering team is using it "horribly incorrectly on clearly comically deficient hardware" makes this article highly biased, and trollish. It's pretty clear that this guy things Digg is a bunch of idiot engineers - I mean, why else allude to "rudimentary comp. sci. knowledge"? These articles might have a central point, but when it's surrounded by a bunch of opinion, it like watching TV news (e.g., Fox News). The real information gets drowned out.
- wvenable 17y ago
  MySQL is a good product, but it does have some significant failings when it comes to getting top-notch performance out of indexes. Digg's description of their entire setup seems a bit unusual -- from how they've defined their tables to their query methods. It seems at least somewhat likely that they were not making optimal use of their technology. I'd be curious what the traffic/content difference between Digg and Stackoverflow is. Stackoverflow uses an architecture very similar to what Forbes proposes here and they have plenty of capacity on rather unremarkable hardware.
  - jbellis 17y ago
    I would bet that SO has several orders of magnitude less traffic than Digg.
    - ratsbane 17y ago
      Looking at Alexa's numbers for a rough comparison of pageviews it looks like Digg gets about 10x as many as SO: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com#trafficstats http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com#trafficstats
      - gill_bates 17y ago
        So while SO runs on a minimal amount of closet-room hardware efficiently and without incident, Digg has heroics and clusters and scale-outs and all sorts of drama to handle just 10x the load? I'm not sure what angle you were coming from, but that makes Digg look like clowns.
        skorgu 17y ago
        Not saying that Digg aren't clowns but the traffic balance makes a huge difference. It's not implausible that Digg has an enormously bigger fraction of writes to reads than SO does which changes the scaling dynamics considerably. Edit: To expand I'd imagine SO serves a lot of static "how do I" google hits for logged-out users which is about as easy to serve as it gets. Digg puts a higher emphasis on the logged in experience and commenting which reduces the ability to cache.
- Devilboy 17y ago
  MySQL is at the bottom of the pile of what qualifies as "RDBMS" so the bottom-feeder comment might be trollish but it's not flat out wrong.
- scotty79 17y ago
  Why thinking that other people are stupid is such prevalent? It leads to so many misunderstandings.

CWIZO 17y ago

I agree with you! And on that note I would like to see more articles that describe problems that NoSQL stuff is good at. This is probably the main reason why there is so much confusion. Everybody is talking about how great cassandra/mongodb/couchdb/... is, but nobody tells you where and how to actually use it.

drhodes 17y ago
What I'd like to see are articles that discuss design techniques. Like, how to incrementally develop a key store db without inconsistencies? There's no schema so .. I'm worried about partial records after adding values to the non-schema. First these addresses didn't have a zipcode field, but now they do. What about relationships between records, isn't there going to be redundant data? What if the user changes their email in the account record, do I have to manually update their contact record? This is what foreign keys are for. OMG, Where am I ... Where's the exit? We're all gonna die! That's basically what I go through every time I think about it. It's a big scary fully loaded gnarly nested hash table aimed directly at my foot.
- CWIZO 17y ago
  That's exactly how I feel, and so far I haven't read a single thing that would clear this things up for me. And I read pretty much everything about this topic that I get my hands on. I'm really egger to learn this stuff, to know where to use it, so I could use it in my projects where appropriate. Somebody who truly gets NoSQL and has use it, should really really write something on this subject.
Nelson69 17y ago
Yes! That's the same stuff I've been smelling. I look at stuff like documents Google has published and Hadoop and I do think to myself that map-reduce and some of the massively distributed stuff could potentially teach RDBMs some new tricks. Then I see these articles and they're all about someone converting a blog from MySQL to MongoDB. I'd love to see the technical details of how Digg used MySQL, why it was slow and why NoSQL is better, how they use it. The more of this I see and the less real information the more I think they didn't know what they were doing in the first place.

wvenable 17y ago

> Why are people talking about NoSQL and relational databases as if they're solving the same problems? If you can switch from one to the other and back again, how are they not solving the same problems?

josephruscio 17y ago
Just because you can pound a screw into the wall with a hammer doesn't mean it solves the same problem as a screwdriver.
- wvenable 17y ago
  And just because you've got a clever saying doesn't mean we aren't just dealing the two different kinds of screw drivers. That's the whole point here.
  - rosser 17y ago
    Just because there's overlap in the problem domains the two classes of tools can be used for does not make them fully interchangeable. If you use a NoSQL tool for transaction processing, you're probably doing it wrong; if you use an RDBMS to house vast amounts of schema-less data, you're probably also doing it wrong. Yes, exceptions exist for every rule, but in the grand Venn diagram of applicability of NoSQL and RDBMSen, there are huge areas that don't overlap. You ignore those areas at your own peril.
    - wvenable 17y ago
      In this case, is the data schema-less? They started with a defined schema and maybe now they don't. Your data defines the tool, but you define the data. I can store JSON in a MySQL column and you'd say I'm using the wrong tool. But I decided to define a schema instead, then I'm using the right tool? It's pretty arbitrary. Some requirements do lean one way or the other but most of the time there's not much of a difference. The areas where clearly an RDBMS is the correct solution or where NoSQL is clearly the correct solution aren't an issue. I think there are huge areas that do overlap. NoSQL is being advocated in far more situations than just where it's clearly the correct solution.

nhebb 17y ago

NoSQL vs. RDBMS debates are like traffic accidents. I slow down to look, but I'm happy I'm not involved.