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used to solve a problem != meant to solve a problem Let's bring up the age-old vehicle analogy. Any vehicle fundamentally solves the the same problem but that'
by sjs 17y ago
used to solve a problem != meant to solve a problem
Let's bring up the age-old vehicle analogy. Any vehicle fundamentally solves the the same problem but that's naïve outlook that doesn't acknowledge any specific use-cases. I can drive a truck down the street to get a Coke or ride my bicycle across Canada but that doesn't mean bicycles and trucks are meant to solve the same problem. The differences are obvious when you need to move a pallet of Coke (or 50).
- scotty79 17y agoWhat the stuff is "meant for" is often not important in real life situations. If you have pallet of Coke to move, a bike and no driving licence that you don't care what the bike was meant for. If you have to hammer a nail but you only have pilers in your close vicinity you hammer it with pilers and don't care what inventors of pilers meant them for. I'm not trying to draw any parallels to RDBMS vs NoSQL just pointing out that what often matters in real life is what problems are solved with which tools and why. What the tools were meant for is pie in the sky.
- sjs 17y agoFor legacy stuff that's true. For new projects we can and should make better decisions (if politics aren't in the way). Many DB systems are free and open source. If you have Unix servers you can choose from PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, Riak, CouchDB, MongoDB, Voldemort, etc. There is no reason not to choose the right tool for the job. You can assess them all if you have the time and resources. It's not the physical world and we basically always have whichever tool we need available to us. I mainly use open source software so that may not be true for everyone I suppose. That's their choice though.