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A lot of people drive cars with manual transmissions because they enjoy driving them, not necessarily because they can gain any tangible benefit beyond enjoymen

A lot of people drive cars with manual transmissions because they enjoy driving them, not necessarily because they can gain any tangible benefit beyond enjoyment. I think the same may be true in many cases with NoSQL. I want to try something different, and it's going to perform better for what I'm doing anyway, so why not. In some experiments at work we got SQL server to do a bulk import of around 1 million rows (with quite a few interspersed reads) in around 5m 30s. We got the same inserts to happen in Mongo in less than a minute. So, we went with Mongo. Do we need that speed? Maybe, maybe not. It sure has been fun to try something new, though.

tpz 17y ago
On the other hand, many people also drive vehicles with manual transmission because doing so yields measurable improvements in both power output and fuel economy. Vehicles with manual transmissions also tend to be more predictably controlled in adverse weather conditions. Interestingly, but not necessarily surprisingly, these points translate quite directly into the NOSQL argument. The downside to the manual transmission is simply that when you don't care to exert more driving effort in a given situation that doesn't benefit enough from the increase in enjoyment, power, economy, and control, you're better off with an automatic in that situation. As before, this aspect also translates rather nicely. :)
- wvenable 17y ago
  I disagree with the analogy. An ORM is like automatic transmission -- it hides the details of switching gears but the gears are still there. SQL is manual transmission: You have maximum flexibility to access your data in a variety of ways with reasonable performance. NoSQL then is like having no transmission at all! It's simpler, as there are no gears to shift and no clutch, and it's faster under very specific conditions. Just as NoSQL has no complex query API and is optimized to fetch your data in a very specific way.

tpz 17y ago

On the other hand, many people also drive vehicles with manual transmission because doing so yields measurable improvements in both power output and fuel economy. Vehicles with manual transmissions also tend to be more predictably controlled in adverse weather conditions. Interestingly, but not necessarily surprisingly, these points translate quite directly into the NOSQL argument. The downside to the manual transmission is simply that when you don't care to exert more driving effort in a given situation that doesn't benefit enough from the increase in enjoyment, power, economy, and control, you're better off with an automatic in that situation. As before, this aspect also translates rather nicely. :)

wvenable 17y ago
I disagree with the analogy. An ORM is like automatic transmission -- it hides the details of switching gears but the gears are still there. SQL is manual transmission: You have maximum flexibility to access your data in a variety of ways with reasonable performance. NoSQL then is like having no transmission at all! It's simpler, as there are no gears to shift and no clutch, and it's faster under very specific conditions. Just as NoSQL has no complex query API and is optimized to fetch your data in a very specific way.