I myself am not actually sold on the noSQL movement, at least not on the idea of ditching SQL entirely. It has its place, but may not be the best solution for e

I myself am not actually sold on the noSQL movement, at least not on the idea of ditching SQL entirely. It has its place, but may not be the best solution for every problem. That said, on the authors complaint about having to restart cassandra when doing the equivalent of an alter table: lately every time we do an alter table in MySQL (which takes hours on large tables, during which time you can do nothing with them), when the alter finally finishes, MySQL mysteriously crashes. MySQL may have given more thought to the problem, but their solution obviously has problems too.