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Oracle on why you shouldn't use NOSQL (PDF)

95 points by omaranto 15y ago

omaranto 15y ago
This is a Google cache link to an Oracle whitepaper on NoSQL databases that jakewins posted to the programming subreddit. On page 13 the paper asks "Do you really want to be contributing to an open source effort?".
- spinchange 15y ago
  That entire paragraph (paper?) is an interesting bit of FUD: >>The NoSQL database has been sponsored by large internet companies. Such sponsorship has added credibility to internet scale claims of the databases and an aura of "coolness." The large internet companies have been motivated by having free database software that is under their complete control. These companies have hired top developers for their scalable database implementations and to keep them running. Is your company prepared to make such an investment in an area which is not your company's core competence? Do you really want to be contributing to an open source effort? Do you really want to bet your project on something that's on the bleeding edge? Do you want to build the superstar team required to make the NoSQL vision a reality? You are not Google.
  - shin_lao 15y ago
    That point falls short. There are companies (such as ours) that provide fully integrated NoSQL software and you don't have to worry about any details. In addition, I'd say that any reasonably-sized database requires full-time engineers to get decent performances (DBA in the case of Oracle).
  - moe 15y ago
    You are not Google. Google employees surely got a good chuckle out of that paragraph.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nphase 15y ago
"While in theory, NoSQL databases can be deployed on hundreds or thousands of machines, in practice the deployments are much smaller and can typically easily fit within a single Oracle database with fewer and more reliable components. The largest production Cassandra cluster has over 100 TB of data in over 150 machines." I find this interesting. I wonder if there any real TCO comparisons have been done to this point. Sure, this paper is full of FUD. But it does raise a valid question for me: What's the difference between paying for Oracle and paying for MySQL, Datastax, or Cloudera support/enterprise to get the added features needed to run my business and keep away from reinventing the wheel?
- shin_lao 15y ago
  That sounds bogus. A 100 TiB Oracle database is doable but incredibly expensive. 1 TiB with the appropriate redundancy will cost you around 10,000 € if you go Oracle. Perhaps you can get a good discount if you order a large cluster right away. So we're looking at 1,000,000 € just for disks here. Then you would have to pay for the CPUs, the licenses and the consulting (lots of it, tuning a 100 TiB system is a huge task). Add another million or two... How much would it cost with a NoSQL solution? Don't want to turn this answer into self promotion, but I'm confident it's well under the million with better performance (assuming you don't need a relational database).
  - Tractiable 15y ago
    How can you self promote something you can't confidently describe?
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    They probably give you volume discounts, you know. And would a 150 machine NoSQL cluster really compare so favorably? An enterprise-grade server with an array of 10k-15k RPM drives or SSD's and appropriate redundancy is not going to be cheap. What about the cost of manpower to operate one vs. the other? If you can hire one novice sysadmin @ $40k, labor costs will be small, but for a 150-machine cluster you aren't going to get far with a $40k novice.
pdubroy 15y ago
In other news, the barber thinks you need a haircut.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  And perhaps a few leaches to get the bad humors out, as well. (financial) "haircut", indeed. I actually agreed with much of the data integrity problems the paper pointed out, but found it a bit too condescending, or perhaps even a bit threatening, around the "You are not Google" part. Big Brother loves me!
praptak 15y ago
"NoSQL databases are not free to operate. Each NoSQL Databases come with the cost of hardware, administration of the hardware, and support of the software." Hey Oracle, if you want to bring this point up, please at least pretend to compare the above costs between NoSQL and your own solution. Otherwise it is just pure FUD: "NoSQL databases eat your CPU cycles, disk and network badndwith! Booooo!"
- antirez 15y ago
  Same argument that was used against Linux, that is also system software. Too old, they should retry with something more interesting.
  - praptak 15y ago
    Well yes but AFAIR MS at least provided some data that could be critically analyzed (whether it stood up to the analysis is a different matter.) I am all for using TCO as an argument in tech advocacy, just as long as it has some backup in verifiable data.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      as long as it has some backup in verifiable data A discussion on TCO is very dependent on the context in which the analysis was made, such as application type, volume of data stored, volume of data indexed, type of data (e.g. is it a tree? is it a graph?), queries per second/hour, number of concurrent connections, analysis on further scaling possible (vertical / horizontal), analysis on the requirements for real-time ad-hoc queries, entry-level costs, and so on and so forth ... Basically, the variables are so many and so complex that any TCO analysis (regardless of validity) won't apply to your case. That said - I rarely feel the need for NoSQL, simply because I can fine-tune PostgreSQL to whatever needs I want. But I'm not running neither Facebook, nor Twitter.
      - mgkimsal 15y ago
        Also include the skills of the people operating everything. A MCSE trying to administer various Linux boxes will have terrible TCO, and a RHCE trying to optimize an NT box will have similarly bad TCO.
shareme 15y ago
Hmm, hey Oracle Google got away with not buying your solution..I think others will wise up to..
mbeattie 15y ago
Oracle really doesn't understand FOSS in general or NoSQL in particular. One of their points is that NoSQL databases don't have all of the advanced features of Oracle database completely missing that the point is not to have PL/SQL or secondary indexes but for simplicity and speed.
6ren 15y ago
Oracle must be miffed: they built the first relational database (the first implementation of Codd's paper), which largely replaced hierarchical databases - i.e. NoSQL.
- psykotic 15y ago
  > Oracle must be miffed: they built the first relational database No way. What about System R? And there were probably others of which I am unaware. Many of the now-standard RDBMS implementation techniques were pioneered in System R. This paper has a good overview: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf
  - 6ren 15y ago
    Ah, I see; it was just the first commercially available relational database - at least according to wiki, it beat the commercial version of System R (System/38) "by a few weeks" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History I read somewhere that it was previously thought of as nice theoretically but not fast enough to be practical. I'm actually very interested in what made the relational model so commercially successful, if you happen to know more about it (it's hard to judge now, because so many other features have been added and market standardization etc). The mathematicians say it was because it's based on a mathematical model - but that doesn't sound like it would be very convincing to pragmatic benefit-oriented business buyers. EDIT that pdf looks pretty good - I'll have a proper read of it when I get the chance - thanks
oacgnol 15y ago
And yet at the same time, Oracle is trying to fold in NoSQL to its product line. The idea of them trying to stymie NoSQL growth and using it at the same time is laughable. They're starting to feel the pressure a little too late now.
- meow 15y ago
  May be they will produce a white paper on why Oracle's NoSQL is better than other NoSQLs :)
alanX 15y ago
In my own experience, deploying applications on traditional relational databases is a pain. Most of the applications I have worked on were applications for State government. The applications get heavily tied to the database, requiring the database to be populated to test the logic. The table structures are unnecessarily convoluted. These applications process client data (eligibility, certifications, enrollment) sometimes in the context of state data. I have built solutions that allow me to collect data from running applications, and later inject data from these collected scenarios into the business logic for testing and debugging. All of this to say that any objective analysis of these systems would reveal no need for a relational database. In fact, imposing the relational transaction model onto these applications is clearly detrimental to the development of these systems, the cost of these systems, the testability of these systems (though this isn't really the fault of the database technology itself), and the performance of these systems. We should be processing the information through an application designed solely according to the needs of the application, and then selective pushing data to a data warehouse for reporting (which can certainly be a relational database). It is almost like Ford claiming all your transportation needs require a truck, and forcing all supermarkets to accommodate driving trucks up and down the grocery aisles... Nobody would say you don't need trucks. But the fact that trucks are sometimes needed isn't proof you should always use a truck.
latch 15y ago
Interesting when you consider Oracle's recently announced NoSQL and big-data plans: http://gigaom.com/cloud/big-data-startups-weigh-in-on-competing-with-oracle/ http://gigaom.com/cloud/big-data-startups-weigh-in-on-compet...
sevenproxies 15y ago
"As a result NoSQL databases may only have partial or no sql support." Gee, thanks Oracle
bitsweet 15y ago
"These companies hire top developers for their scalable (NoSQL) database implementations and to keep them running...Do you really want to build the superstar team required to make the NoSQL vision? You are not Google." Wow - a salient remark about the state of enterprise software and what message Oracle sees resonating with management.
- anamax 15y ago
  Are you saying that management should want to build a superstar team to support the DB? DB operation is overhead. I can see wanting a superstar team to provide things that customers value, but no customer cares about SQL vs NoSQL.
  - bitsweet 15y ago
    The reality is running software (proprietary or FOSS) is costly...A large DB operation will be an expensive overhead regardless. I wasn't commenting on SQL vs NoSQL and which will add more value. I was making a remark on Oracle's insinuating tone "Your developers are probably poorly skilled, your not going to change that, using new tools require new skills, you'll fail at that because your not Google - don't even try" Regardless of my personal opinions, what happened to striving for excellence?
    - anamax 15y ago
      > I was making a remark on Oracle's insinuating tone "Your developers are probably poorly skilled, your not going to change that, using new tools require new skills, you'll fail at that because your not Google - don't even try" That "insinuation" is mostly true. > Regardless of my personal opinions, what happened to striving for excellence? Striving for excellence in everything is bad business. Excellence is expensive. In many cases, the expense far outweighs the benefits.
zzzeek 15y ago
This document is nothing more than an embarrassment for Oracle. "One size DOES fit all - and that size is ORACLE!" Really? Even the most entrenched, old school DBA stuck in the bowels of some drab insurance company in Indiana wouldn't buy that. I'm not a NoSQL guy by any means (check my profile) but the desperation in this doc is way more palpable than a guy like Ellison would approve of.
- va_coder 15y ago
  "Even the most entrenched, old school DBA stuck in the bowels of some drab insurance company in Indiana wouldn't buy that" I often run into people with the opinion that Oracle is the only viable solution.
- virmundi 15y ago
  Not all drab insurance companies in Indiana use Oracle. I know; I've worked at 2! Some use DB2.
- illumin8 15y ago
  You truly underestimate the zealotry and kool-aid drinking capacity of the average Oracle DBA. When your entire career is based on the training and certifications you've received from a single company, every database solution magically becomes Oracle...
  - warfangle 15y ago
    When all you have is a hammer, all the problems you encounter end up looking like nails.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    And what NoSQL solution justifies a deductible junket to Oracle OpenWorld, including a concert to see Sting, Tom Petty, and the English Beat? http://www.oracle.com/openworld/connect/face-to-face/appreciation-event/index.html http://www.oracle.com/openworld/connect/face-to-face/appreci... (Previous Oracle Appreciation Concert performers have included Elton John, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Roger Daltry, Don Henley, the Black Eyed Peas, Devo, and Joan Jett.)
dicroce 15y ago
Yes, this document is FUD. Frankly, I'm surprised they released this... The tone is: desperation. That said, the NOSQL movement is so full of hype... It really annoys me that whenever anything new comes around, a large amount of people want to use it for EVERYTHING! NoSQL is inconvenient for a lot of what it is getting used for today... In 5 years, we'll be past that and we'll see it used more appropriately.
- Klondike 15y ago
  I think that's a bit of a misread. Sometimes ravenous adoption comes from something that legitimately makes 90% of cases easier. Once I tried MongoDB, it effortlessly became my default for projects large and small going forward - SQL would be a lot of extra work. NoSQL scaling well explains companies adopting it, but it doesn't explain the masses of individual developers and tiny startups jumping to it. That's explained by it being really, really pleasant.
wizzard 15y ago
"NoSQL databases may only have partial or no sql support." Really?! I never would have guessed. I mean, it's not like it's right there in the name. They go on to state that if you need RDBMS features, you should use an RDBMS. My mind is being completely blown here.
- rada 15y ago
  Nowadays, NoSQL is expanded to "not only SQL".
sdizdar 15y ago
I guess this boil down to the following four points: - NoSQL is good in scaling: but do you really need to scale? Is your business so great to handle 1M users? Simple MySQL (and PostgreSQL when mysql is not ok) will go a long way for many many installation. - NoSQL are in good in scaling but it is pain to maintain it: it hard to hire somebody who knows it good, there are no good management tools, etc. - NoSQL requires you to make your application logic more complex and not portable - There is no clear NoSQL leader and clear mainstream knowledge. And a lot of these NoSQL implementation requires some secret sauce known only to engineers maintaining and developing big NoSQL installations at Facebook, Google and Amazon. In short, for startups, NoSQL is one more variable introducing risks and unknowns. So I think startups should not go NoSQL unless that is the core of their offering.
- artsrc 15y ago
  These seem somewhat similar to the reason you would use simple files rather than SQL databases.
- jeffdavis 15y ago
  "In short, for startups, NoSQL is one more variable introducing risks and unknowns. So I think startups should not go NoSQL unless that is the core of their offering." Well said. NoSQL may have a lot to offer in some cases, but I think "easy" is an illusion when you look at the full picture.
DanielRibeiro 15y ago
The best part of the article is the links. They also provide a competent summary for some concepts, like CAP, BASE and PACELC. They totally fail at argumenting them though, having a strong bias towards their products. As expected.
KevinEldon 15y ago
This is a marketing piece targeted at decision making managers or architects who have to justify their decision to activist decision making managers. Which is ok, Oracle knows who pays the bills.
pferreir 15y ago
"With many rapidly evolving alternatives in the NoSQL space, providing a paper that compares them will be out of date as soon as it is published, but some blogs have." Enough said.
schiptsov 15y ago
Because you should buy, buy, buy. ^_^ Buy several gigs of binary blobs for what Postgresql can do for free, buy more Java crap such as Application Servers, Middle-wares, etc. buy hi-end servers to run all that shit, because they want to return their investment in that useless piles of Java crap. Each time you're using redis or mongodb or postgresql you're hurt the bonuses of Orcacle's management and sales people. ^_^
jsr 15y ago
Amazing that this post hits HN the same day Oracle announces "Oracle NoSQL Database" ... http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/...
stickfigure 15y ago
"Go for the tried and true path. Don't be risking your data on NoSQL databases." The document makes a lot more sense when you imagine the Samuel L. Jackson character from Pulp Fiction reading it aloud.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  Never saw Pulp Fiction. I remember SLJ giving a speech in "Deep Blue Sea", though. Alas, I think that speech ended a little prematurely :-) As an alternative, how about having (Simpsons) "Comic Book Guy" read it? (with apologies to Steve Yegge)
7952 15y ago
Why don't they just create a key value style API for Oracle? If people are prepared to a lot pay for a database, maybe the same people will pay a lot for NoSQL.
cleaver 15y ago
Sometime soon, Oracle will develop or acquire a NoSQL product and this whitepaper will be buried. It will then be replaced by a new whitepaper to get you excited about how Oracle's new product will revolutionize price and performance for your web application.
Calamitous 15y ago
"Philip-Morris on why you shouldn't quit smoking"
johnzabroski 15y ago
There is some good information in this article if your ignore the Oracle marketing message. It is basically a synopsis of the past 3 years of NoSQL discussion. What it doesn't mention is that everyone who picks NoSQL generally acknowledges these downsides. So it doesn't do a good job explaining why people still pick NoSQL. TCO is probably the biggest factor I would have in picking NoSQL. As a (Microsoft) SQL Server customer, we (developers) all hate the cost of scaling SQL Server for each customer. Each customer needs their own resource governance. This means either separate servers or a virtual machine, both tied to a SAN. Virtualization MSSQL licensing costs are large without much material benefit due to odd licensing strategies that negate most if not all financial benefit to virtualization for small IT shops like us. By comparison, the better we understand why customers use our product and the more engineering decisions we can make (get away with?) then the cheaper technologies we will be able to use (NoSQL, etc.).
- Roboprog 15y ago
  Your TCO points sound more like a "commercial vs FOSS" argument than a "SQL or not" argument. Care to elaborate or refine?
  - johnzabroski 15y ago
    I left out the part where most of our fetch operations operate on just one primary key. The data structure is very stable and the need for different kinds of analysis has disappeared after several years of refining what the product does and should be. It's an analysis app that sets market prices to hypothetical values and simulates that alternate reality. It provides very fine-grained maximum likelihood explanations for why revenue would drop or rise.
VladRussian 15y ago
nice FUD (strange resemblance to the Sun's old FUD on Sparc vs. x86) With all my respect to Oracle (and gratitude for that part of living i make from it), they would better spend these resources on implementing a distributed query execution (the parallel query implementation they have is a joke really), and it would make their position vs. NoSQL much more stronger.
justinhj 15y ago
Some of the points are definitely worth considering. It's also a great resource for links on NoSQL issues. I can't help feeling this was a project for an intern however. It wasn't proofread very well. "embrace asynchrony" - really? "Clearly the traditional 3-tier application development model scales well and the desired development model for established non-internet companies." - there's a missing word here somewhere to make this a sentence
roder 15y ago
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/... hipster oracle loves irony
bartz 15y ago
The problem with NoSQL databases is that developers still do not understand how to use them well. NoSQL requires relearning how to use a database. Many developers misuse NoSQL databases, relying on the SQL patterns they know so well. I think that's Oracle's main point here. For example, it's easy to have a lot of round trips if you use NoSQL badly, but if you adapt and take advantage of its strongpoints, NoSQL can easily reduce the query complexity. The point of this paper is to scare Oracle's customers from switching to NoSQL, and I agree that companies should not blindly switch from SQL to NoSQL without the willingness to relearn and adapt.
- Tsagadai 15y ago
  Everything in computing requires learning and relearning. If you hired, or work with, developers who can't learn or adapt you have far more serious problems than database choices to worry about.
smoyer 15y ago
Oracle is correct when the bemoan NoSQL's lack of joins and relations ... so I'm using CouchDB as my operational store and exporting the data to PostgreSQL so that I can issue arbitrary queries. It took a little bit of work to make the exporter understand that there might be missing or extra fields in the CouchDB documents, but it was well worth it.
hugacow 15y ago
Wow, this is a huge fail. It should have started with graphs based on studies of major customers that tried to make the switch and failed and why on the first 20 pages, but instead it starts off by naming the leaders in the space that use NoSQL. They've convinced me to use NoSQL now, because they couldn't just shut up. Oracle, you screwed Sun, and now you are screwing yourself.
davesims 15y ago
I guess that means they'll be sunsetting this guy: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/...
cowmix 15y ago
NoSQL? Nope. I just need PostgreSQL and SSDs.. done!
dlitz 15y ago
TL;DR: OOGABOOGABOOGA!

95 points by omaranto 15y ago

This is a Google cache link to an Oracle whitepaper on NoSQL databases that jakewins posted to the programming subreddit. On page 13 the paper asks "Do you really want to be contributing to an open source effort?".

spinchange 15y ago
That entire paragraph (paper?) is an interesting bit of FUD: >>The NoSQL database has been sponsored by large internet companies. Such sponsorship has added credibility to internet scale claims of the databases and an aura of "coolness." The large internet companies have been motivated by having free database software that is under their complete control. These companies have hired top developers for their scalable database implementations and to keep them running. Is your company prepared to make such an investment in an area which is not your company's core competence? Do you really want to be contributing to an open source effort? Do you really want to bet your project on something that's on the bleeding edge? Do you want to build the superstar team required to make the NoSQL vision a reality? You are not Google.
- shin_lao 15y ago
  That point falls short. There are companies (such as ours) that provide fully integrated NoSQL software and you don't have to worry about any details. In addition, I'd say that any reasonably-sized database requires full-time engineers to get decent performances (DBA in the case of Oracle).
- moe 15y ago
  You are not Google. Google employees surely got a good chuckle out of that paragraph.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nphase 15y ago

"While in theory, NoSQL databases can be deployed on hundreds or thousands of machines, in practice the deployments are much smaller and can typically easily fit within a single Oracle database with fewer and more reliable components. The largest production Cassandra cluster has over 100 TB of data in over 150 machines." I find this interesting. I wonder if there any real TCO comparisons have been done to this point. Sure, this paper is full of FUD. But it does raise a valid question for me: What's the difference between paying for Oracle and paying for MySQL, Datastax, or Cloudera support/enterprise to get the added features needed to run my business and keep away from reinventing the wheel?

shin_lao 15y ago
That sounds bogus. A 100 TiB Oracle database is doable but incredibly expensive. 1 TiB with the appropriate redundancy will cost you around 10,000 € if you go Oracle. Perhaps you can get a good discount if you order a large cluster right away. So we're looking at 1,000,000 € just for disks here. Then you would have to pay for the CPUs, the licenses and the consulting (lots of it, tuning a 100 TiB system is a huge task). Add another million or two... How much would it cost with a NoSQL solution? Don't want to turn this answer into self promotion, but I'm confident it's well under the million with better performance (assuming you don't need a relational database).
- Tractiable 15y ago
  How can you self promote something you can't confidently describe?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  They probably give you volume discounts, you know. And would a 150 machine NoSQL cluster really compare so favorably? An enterprise-grade server with an array of 10k-15k RPM drives or SSD's and appropriate redundancy is not going to be cheap. What about the cost of manpower to operate one vs. the other? If you can hire one novice sysadmin @ $40k, labor costs will be small, but for a 150-machine cluster you aren't going to get far with a $40k novice.

pdubroy 15y ago

In other news, the barber thinks you need a haircut.

Roboprog 15y ago
And perhaps a few leaches to get the bad humors out, as well. (financial) "haircut", indeed. I actually agreed with much of the data integrity problems the paper pointed out, but found it a bit too condescending, or perhaps even a bit threatening, around the "You are not Google" part. Big Brother loves me!

praptak 15y ago

"NoSQL databases are not free to operate. Each NoSQL Databases come with the cost of hardware, administration of the hardware, and support of the software." Hey Oracle, if you want to bring this point up, please at least pretend to compare the above costs between NoSQL and your own solution. Otherwise it is just pure FUD: "NoSQL databases eat your CPU cycles, disk and network badndwith! Booooo!"

antirez 15y ago
Same argument that was used against Linux, that is also system software. Too old, they should retry with something more interesting.
- praptak 15y ago
  Well yes but AFAIR MS at least provided some data that could be critically analyzed (whether it stood up to the analysis is a different matter.) I am all for using TCO as an argument in tech advocacy, just as long as it has some backup in verifiable data.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    as long as it has some backup in verifiable data A discussion on TCO is very dependent on the context in which the analysis was made, such as application type, volume of data stored, volume of data indexed, type of data (e.g. is it a tree? is it a graph?), queries per second/hour, number of concurrent connections, analysis on further scaling possible (vertical / horizontal), analysis on the requirements for real-time ad-hoc queries, entry-level costs, and so on and so forth ... Basically, the variables are so many and so complex that any TCO analysis (regardless of validity) won't apply to your case. That said - I rarely feel the need for NoSQL, simply because I can fine-tune PostgreSQL to whatever needs I want. But I'm not running neither Facebook, nor Twitter.
    - mgkimsal 15y ago
      Also include the skills of the people operating everything. A MCSE trying to administer various Linux boxes will have terrible TCO, and a RHCE trying to optimize an NT box will have similarly bad TCO.

shareme 15y ago

Hmm, hey Oracle Google got away with not buying your solution..I think others will wise up to..

mbeattie 15y ago

Oracle really doesn't understand FOSS in general or NoSQL in particular. One of their points is that NoSQL databases don't have all of the advanced features of Oracle database completely missing that the point is not to have PL/SQL or secondary indexes but for simplicity and speed.

6ren 15y ago

Oracle must be miffed: they built the first relational database (the first implementation of Codd's paper), which largely replaced hierarchical databases - i.e. NoSQL.

psykotic 15y ago
> Oracle must be miffed: they built the first relational database No way. What about System R? And there were probably others of which I am unaware. Many of the now-standard RDBMS implementation techniques were pioneered in System R. This paper has a good overview: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf
- 6ren 15y ago
  Ah, I see; it was just the first commercially available relational database - at least according to wiki, it beat the commercial version of System R (System/38) "by a few weeks" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History I read somewhere that it was previously thought of as nice theoretically but not fast enough to be practical. I'm actually very interested in what made the relational model so commercially successful, if you happen to know more about it (it's hard to judge now, because so many other features have been added and market standardization etc). The mathematicians say it was because it's based on a mathematical model - but that doesn't sound like it would be very convincing to pragmatic benefit-oriented business buyers. EDIT that pdf looks pretty good - I'll have a proper read of it when I get the chance - thanks

oacgnol 15y ago

And yet at the same time, Oracle is trying to fold in NoSQL to its product line. The idea of them trying to stymie NoSQL growth and using it at the same time is laughable. They're starting to feel the pressure a little too late now.

meow 15y ago
May be they will produce a white paper on why Oracle's NoSQL is better than other NoSQLs :)

alanX 15y ago

In my own experience, deploying applications on traditional relational databases is a pain. Most of the applications I have worked on were applications for State government. The applications get heavily tied to the database, requiring the database to be populated to test the logic. The table structures are unnecessarily convoluted. These applications process client data (eligibility, certifications, enrollment) sometimes in the context of state data. I have built solutions that allow me to collect data from running applications, and later inject data from these collected scenarios into the business logic for testing and debugging. All of this to say that any objective analysis of these systems would reveal no need for a relational database. In fact, imposing the relational transaction model onto these applications is clearly detrimental to the development of these systems, the cost of these systems, the testability of these systems (though this isn't really the fault of the database technology itself), and the performance of these systems. We should be processing the information through an application designed solely according to the needs of the application, and then selective pushing data to a data warehouse for reporting (which can certainly be a relational database). It is almost like Ford claiming all your transportation needs require a truck, and forcing all supermarkets to accommodate driving trucks up and down the grocery aisles... Nobody would say you don't need trucks. But the fact that trucks are sometimes needed isn't proof you should always use a truck.

latch 15y ago

Interesting when you consider Oracle's recently announced NoSQL and big-data plans: http://gigaom.com/cloud/big-data-startups-weigh-in-on-competing-with-oracle/ http://gigaom.com/cloud/big-data-startups-weigh-in-on-compet...

sevenproxies 15y ago

"As a result NoSQL databases may only have partial or no sql support." Gee, thanks Oracle

bitsweet 15y ago

"These companies hire top developers for their scalable (NoSQL) database implementations and to keep them running...Do you really want to build the superstar team required to make the NoSQL vision? You are not Google." Wow - a salient remark about the state of enterprise software and what message Oracle sees resonating with management.

anamax 15y ago
Are you saying that management should want to build a superstar team to support the DB? DB operation is overhead. I can see wanting a superstar team to provide things that customers value, but no customer cares about SQL vs NoSQL.
- bitsweet 15y ago
  The reality is running software (proprietary or FOSS) is costly...A large DB operation will be an expensive overhead regardless. I wasn't commenting on SQL vs NoSQL and which will add more value. I was making a remark on Oracle's insinuating tone "Your developers are probably poorly skilled, your not going to change that, using new tools require new skills, you'll fail at that because your not Google - don't even try" Regardless of my personal opinions, what happened to striving for excellence?
  - anamax 15y ago
    > I was making a remark on Oracle's insinuating tone "Your developers are probably poorly skilled, your not going to change that, using new tools require new skills, you'll fail at that because your not Google - don't even try" That "insinuation" is mostly true. > Regardless of my personal opinions, what happened to striving for excellence? Striving for excellence in everything is bad business. Excellence is expensive. In many cases, the expense far outweighs the benefits.

zzzeek 15y ago

This document is nothing more than an embarrassment for Oracle. "One size DOES fit all - and that size is ORACLE!" Really? Even the most entrenched, old school DBA stuck in the bowels of some drab insurance company in Indiana wouldn't buy that. I'm not a NoSQL guy by any means (check my profile) but the desperation in this doc is way more palpable than a guy like Ellison would approve of.

va_coder 15y ago
"Even the most entrenched, old school DBA stuck in the bowels of some drab insurance company in Indiana wouldn't buy that" I often run into people with the opinion that Oracle is the only viable solution.
virmundi 15y ago
Not all drab insurance companies in Indiana use Oracle. I know; I've worked at 2! Some use DB2.
illumin8 15y ago
You truly underestimate the zealotry and kool-aid drinking capacity of the average Oracle DBA. When your entire career is based on the training and certifications you've received from a single company, every database solution magically becomes Oracle...
- warfangle 15y ago
  When all you have is a hammer, all the problems you encounter end up looking like nails.
- gojomo 15y ago
  And what NoSQL solution justifies a deductible junket to Oracle OpenWorld, including a concert to see Sting, Tom Petty, and the English Beat? http://www.oracle.com/openworld/connect/face-to-face/appreciation-event/index.html http://www.oracle.com/openworld/connect/face-to-face/appreci... (Previous Oracle Appreciation Concert performers have included Elton John, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Roger Daltry, Don Henley, the Black Eyed Peas, Devo, and Joan Jett.)

dicroce 15y ago

Yes, this document is FUD. Frankly, I'm surprised they released this... The tone is: desperation. That said, the NOSQL movement is so full of hype... It really annoys me that whenever anything new comes around, a large amount of people want to use it for EVERYTHING! NoSQL is inconvenient for a lot of what it is getting used for today... In 5 years, we'll be past that and we'll see it used more appropriately.

Klondike 15y ago
I think that's a bit of a misread. Sometimes ravenous adoption comes from something that legitimately makes 90% of cases easier. Once I tried MongoDB, it effortlessly became my default for projects large and small going forward - SQL would be a lot of extra work. NoSQL scaling well explains companies adopting it, but it doesn't explain the masses of individual developers and tiny startups jumping to it. That's explained by it being really, really pleasant.

wizzard 15y ago

"NoSQL databases may only have partial or no sql support." Really?! I never would have guessed. I mean, it's not like it's right there in the name. They go on to state that if you need RDBMS features, you should use an RDBMS. My mind is being completely blown here.

rada 15y ago
Nowadays, NoSQL is expanded to "not only SQL".

sdizdar 15y ago

I guess this boil down to the following four points: - NoSQL is good in scaling: but do you really need to scale? Is your business so great to handle 1M users? Simple MySQL (and PostgreSQL when mysql is not ok) will go a long way for many many installation. - NoSQL are in good in scaling but it is pain to maintain it: it hard to hire somebody who knows it good, there are no good management tools, etc. - NoSQL requires you to make your application logic more complex and not portable - There is no clear NoSQL leader and clear mainstream knowledge. And a lot of these NoSQL implementation requires some secret sauce known only to engineers maintaining and developing big NoSQL installations at Facebook, Google and Amazon. In short, for startups, NoSQL is one more variable introducing risks and unknowns. So I think startups should not go NoSQL unless that is the core of their offering.

artsrc 15y ago
These seem somewhat similar to the reason you would use simple files rather than SQL databases.
jeffdavis 15y ago
"In short, for startups, NoSQL is one more variable introducing risks and unknowns. So I think startups should not go NoSQL unless that is the core of their offering." Well said. NoSQL may have a lot to offer in some cases, but I think "easy" is an illusion when you look at the full picture.

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

The best part of the article is the links. They also provide a competent summary for some concepts, like CAP, BASE and PACELC. They totally fail at argumenting them though, having a strong bias towards their products. As expected.

KevinEldon 15y ago

This is a marketing piece targeted at decision making managers or architects who have to justify their decision to activist decision making managers. Which is ok, Oracle knows who pays the bills.

pferreir 15y ago

"With many rapidly evolving alternatives in the NoSQL space, providing a paper that compares them will be out of date as soon as it is published, but some blogs have." Enough said.

schiptsov 15y ago

Because you should buy, buy, buy. ^_^ Buy several gigs of binary blobs for what Postgresql can do for free, buy more Java crap such as Application Servers, Middle-wares, etc. buy hi-end servers to run all that shit, because they want to return their investment in that useless piles of Java crap. Each time you're using redis or mongodb or postgresql you're hurt the bonuses of Orcacle's management and sales people. ^_^

jsr 15y ago

Amazing that this post hits HN the same day Oracle announces "Oracle NoSQL Database" ... http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/...

stickfigure 15y ago

"Go for the tried and true path. Don't be risking your data on NoSQL databases." The document makes a lot more sense when you imagine the Samuel L. Jackson character from Pulp Fiction reading it aloud.

Roboprog 15y ago
Never saw Pulp Fiction. I remember SLJ giving a speech in "Deep Blue Sea", though. Alas, I think that speech ended a little prematurely :-) As an alternative, how about having (Simpsons) "Comic Book Guy" read it? (with apologies to Steve Yegge)

7952 15y ago

Why don't they just create a key value style API for Oracle? If people are prepared to a lot pay for a database, maybe the same people will pay a lot for NoSQL.

cleaver 15y ago

Sometime soon, Oracle will develop or acquire a NoSQL product and this whitepaper will be buried. It will then be replaced by a new whitepaper to get you excited about how Oracle's new product will revolutionize price and performance for your web application.

Calamitous 15y ago

"Philip-Morris on why you shouldn't quit smoking"

johnzabroski 15y ago

There is some good information in this article if your ignore the Oracle marketing message. It is basically a synopsis of the past 3 years of NoSQL discussion. What it doesn't mention is that everyone who picks NoSQL generally acknowledges these downsides. So it doesn't do a good job explaining why people still pick NoSQL. TCO is probably the biggest factor I would have in picking NoSQL. As a (Microsoft) SQL Server customer, we (developers) all hate the cost of scaling SQL Server for each customer. Each customer needs their own resource governance. This means either separate servers or a virtual machine, both tied to a SAN. Virtualization MSSQL licensing costs are large without much material benefit due to odd licensing strategies that negate most if not all financial benefit to virtualization for small IT shops like us. By comparison, the better we understand why customers use our product and the more engineering decisions we can make (get away with?) then the cheaper technologies we will be able to use (NoSQL, etc.).

Roboprog 15y ago
Your TCO points sound more like a "commercial vs FOSS" argument than a "SQL or not" argument. Care to elaborate or refine?
- johnzabroski 15y ago
  I left out the part where most of our fetch operations operate on just one primary key. The data structure is very stable and the need for different kinds of analysis has disappeared after several years of refining what the product does and should be. It's an analysis app that sets market prices to hypothetical values and simulates that alternate reality. It provides very fine-grained maximum likelihood explanations for why revenue would drop or rise.

VladRussian 15y ago

nice FUD (strange resemblance to the Sun's old FUD on Sparc vs. x86) With all my respect to Oracle (and gratitude for that part of living i make from it), they would better spend these resources on implementing a distributed query execution (the parallel query implementation they have is a joke really), and it would make their position vs. NoSQL much more stronger.

justinhj 15y ago

Some of the points are definitely worth considering. It's also a great resource for links on NoSQL issues. I can't help feeling this was a project for an intern however. It wasn't proofread very well. "embrace asynchrony" - really? "Clearly the traditional 3-tier application development model scales well and the desired development model for established non-internet companies." - there's a missing word here somewhere to make this a sentence

roder 15y ago

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/... hipster oracle loves irony

bartz 15y ago

The problem with NoSQL databases is that developers still do not understand how to use them well. NoSQL requires relearning how to use a database. Many developers misuse NoSQL databases, relying on the SQL patterns they know so well. I think that's Oracle's main point here. For example, it's easy to have a lot of round trips if you use NoSQL badly, but if you adapt and take advantage of its strongpoints, NoSQL can easily reduce the query complexity. The point of this paper is to scare Oracle's customers from switching to NoSQL, and I agree that companies should not blindly switch from SQL to NoSQL without the willingness to relearn and adapt.

Tsagadai 15y ago
Everything in computing requires learning and relearning. If you hired, or work with, developers who can't learn or adapt you have far more serious problems than database choices to worry about.

smoyer 15y ago

Oracle is correct when the bemoan NoSQL's lack of joins and relations ... so I'm using CouchDB as my operational store and exporting the data to PostgreSQL so that I can issue arbitrary queries. It took a little bit of work to make the exporter understand that there might be missing or extra fields in the CouchDB documents, but it was well worth it.

hugacow 15y ago

Wow, this is a huge fail. It should have started with graphs based on studies of major customers that tried to make the switch and failed and why on the first 20 pages, but instead it starts off by naming the leaders in the space that use NoSQL. They've convinced me to use NoSQL now, because they couldn't just shut up. Oracle, you screwed Sun, and now you are screwing yourself.

davesims 15y ago

I guess that means they'll be sunsetting this guy: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/...

cowmix 15y ago

NoSQL? Nope. I just need PostgreSQL and SSDs.. done!

dlitz 15y ago

TL;DR: OOGABOOGABOOGA!