6 ms·

NoSQL: The Love Child of Google, Amazon and ... Lotus Notes

75 points by materialhero 14y ago

eykanal 14y ago
What with the shelf-life of software being so short, it's very easy to forget how programs that are now almost universally hated, derided, and synonymous with "large, bloated corporations" (i.e., Lotus Notes) at one time represented the state-of-the-art in software engineering.
- dagw 14y ago
  I worked with Notes and Domino quite a bit back in 97-98 and my memories of it from that time are mostly positive. We used it for writing fairly ad-hoc documentation and workflow management tools and also turning these into in-house web apps. It also integrated very nicely with Lotus 1-2-3 and made it easy to produce custom reports as spreadsheets with nice graphs and tables. It was surprisingly smooth and easy to work with compared to anything else at the time (and in many ways compared to most things that came after). I haven't looked at Notes since 98, but I've occasionally been tempted to take a look at later version to see how a tool I really quite liked managed to turn itself into the most hated software in the industry.
  - lifebeyondfife 14y ago
    Used it back in 2006 for company email, policy documents and software issue tracking - both enhancements, bugs etc. raised by product management, development and client facing services. It was a mess. A slow, grinding mess of unusable screens and panels. If you end up typing things in an external text editor simply to copy-and-paste it in just to guarantee you don't lose your work, you know something has gone terribly wrong. Got a friend whose company were recently bought by IBM and they "eat their own dog food". He's not happy to be now using Lotus Notes.
    - johnward 14y ago
      Hehe maybe your friend and I are at the same place. I feel the same way...
    - stephengillie 14y ago
      I don't think anybody is happy "dogfooding" a product. It sends the message that your function isn't that essential.
      - skrebbel 14y ago
        which is why, at GitHub, they use Visual SourceSafe for all their configuration management.
  - scott_s 14y ago
    My guess, as someone who uses Notes everyday, is that its primary purpose now is an email and calendar application. Its richer capabilities are generally not needed, and add friction to normal email and calendar use.
  - nsxwolf 14y ago
    I started my developer career on Lotus Notes 4 back in 98. It offered a real platform at a time when web applications weren't exactly trivial to create. You could easily build database driven applications and deploy them instantly to the entire organization. Lotus and Domino were very forward looking products. I know the conventional wisdom from users is that they were terrible, but I'll always have fond memories of working with the technology.
    - zaphar 14y ago
      My sense from friends and colleagues who have used or developed for Lotus notes is that Users generally hated it but people developing apps for it loved it. I've always assumed the technology was solid but like most things in the category of custom one-off but long lived software for companies the UI/UX was almost always subpar.
      - DeepDuh 14y ago
        I think you nailed it. Notes apps that aren't developed with some strong UI guidelines tend to look ugly. It's a bit like web 1.0 in terms of UI - good developers can make neat and useful applications with it, but most of the stuff just looks bad since useful guidelines weren't there yet when the tools have first been developed.
    - gadders 14y ago
      v4.0? Luxury :-) I started on 3.01 with no scripting. I was at Lotusphere when Mozzie Shore (sp?) demo-ed Notes 4 and got a standing ovation.
    - DeepDuh 14y ago
      I've still been developing for Lotus Notes as a side job during my studies - it's still very big in Europe. Developing, administering (and to some extent using) classic notes applications is still a breeze. The reason why it's so hated is most probably the direction IBM took it in. It should have neve been marketed as a messaging application. Imagine a megacorp buying Evernote and turning it into an Messaging client - that's basically what happened from what I get. The 8.x eclipse made everything worse by adding another layer on top of the old C libraries and not replacing anything. It also broke the old mantra of 'everything is a notes db/document' which is a major point of why it worked so well together - similar to Unix.
  - Torgo 14y ago
    Your experience definitely doesn't match mine. That said, I was not doing the same sort of work as you, so I will mostly limit my complaints about Notes to general usability. If someone is getting specific functionality out of Notes they couldn't get anywhere else, I can see somebody overlooking all of this. I don't remember what year I started using Lotus Notes, it was at least 1995, I was using it on Windows 95 and on Windows 3.11. I was working summers during college. What's incredible about Lotus Notes is how we're now in 2012 and it still has some of the same bugs, same UI weirdness, and it's still pretty much just as slow. I think it's hated for pretty straightforward reasons, things like how it doesn't conform to your operating system's usability guidelines, it still more or less acts like the mainframe application it was derived from; so when you'd press F5 to refresh it would instead close the window (if you want to refresh, you have to press the square in the corner, where you know there's an invisible widget that refreshes--you just know because you've used it for so long.) There's that weird tile screen where you click a tile and it indents like a button being pressed, but then just stays there and does nothing--why??? It's slow no matter how fast your computer is. It crashes. For years when it crashed you had to completely restart your computer of Lotus refused to run (who remembers when KillNotes was invented so you didn't have to do this???) It does things in just plain weird ways that cause weird side-effects, like how selecting multiple documents to delete would clear your clipboard. Bugs that seem unacceptable for an enterprise project, like when I would reply to someone and it would send the reply back to me instead of the sender. Or how selecting documents to archive and archiving them only archives about 85 percent of them, so you get in the habit of selecting the same batch to archive, over and over, as it progressively successfully archives only a portion of the documents you selected, until they are finally all archived. These are only a few complaints, there are many more. I used Lotus Notes at every job between then almost all the way up until now. Some things got a little better; they fixed a bunch of the bugs, when it (only occasionally now) crashes you don't have to restart your computer. F5 doesn't close your window. You almost never see that near-useless tile screen. And there are the things that Lotus Notes has always done right, like how it's had built in signing and encryption since forever. And the document store, as is the original point of the article, was pretty cool at the time, but IMO you really needed an Notes expert to keep it all together for your business, where document stores now are pretty easy. Sorry if this was long and negative. But every time there is discussion about Lotus Notes I feel compelled to talk about my long term experiences as a user (as opposed to admin, or content creator) of it. I think there is definitely a reason it is hated.
  - omh 14y ago
    I'm a (reluctant) Notes/Domino admin at a small company. We use it for email and a few small apps. My impressions of where it went "wrong": * It was built before a lot of de-facto standards for UIs came about. So it uses different buttons, shortcuts, styles and UI paradigms compared to other software (mainly Office). This creates friction for most users. Unfortunately they can't "fix" it without irritating the users who've got used to the traditional Lotus way. * It got too complicated for ordinary users to develop their own apps. So instead of all the users being familiar with its power (and so understanding of its weaknesses), 99% of users just know it as a "buggy email client" * IBM gave up on expanding its power or fixing any of its bugs, and instead just treat it as a cash cow for the companies which are still using it.
    - agumonkey 14y ago
      Curious since they made a big port onto Eclipse, was it unworthy in terms of evolution ?
    - yuhong 14y ago
      AFAIK they are finally doing a major new release with a beta coming soon: http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-notesdomino-9-social-edition-public-beta-planned-for-december-14 http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-notesdomino...
  - gadders 14y ago
    The thing that people forget is that 15-20 years ago when it first came out, you couldn't really replicate databases easily and having everybody in a global company access one database in, say, New York was a non-starter.
scott_s 14y ago
“NoSQL” is a misnomer. NoSQL databases aren’t designed to abandon SQL, the structured query language used pull information from traditional databases such as Oracle and MySQL. A better name would be “non-relational database.” NoSQL databases don’t use the neat tables of data that underpin relational databases. Thank you. I've been beating that drum for a while. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284)
- johnward 14y ago
  I'm not experienced with NoSQL but the name has confused me ever since I've read about it. I believe it stands for "Not only SQL" but the abbreviation really seems to hint that it abandons all SQL.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    As far as I know, "not only SQL" is a backronym, coined because of that confusion.
    - scott_s 14y ago
      I suspect that is correct, as it seems that "NoSQL" was a glib name for an informal meeting (http://nosql.eventbrite.com/ http://nosql.eventbrite.com/), and was not necessarily intended to live on.
      - klint 14y ago
        Yep, as briefly mentioned in the OP: http://blog.sym-link.com/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name.html http://blog.sym-link.com/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name.ht...
- jfb 14y ago
  An actual relational database not bound to the SQL nightmare would be something interesting indeed.
icebraining 14y ago
Meanwhile, non-relational databases go back at least to in '60s and predate the relational model. http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.html http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.h...
reginaldo 14y ago
There's a nice Stack Overflow podcast[1] on the same subject, where Damien Katz talks a little about what he liked on Lotus Notes. I thought it was a nice episode. [1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/
omh 14y ago
Somewhat related: Damien Katz has a brilliant blog post describing his experiences rewriting the Lotus Notes formula engine, and dealing with the "bugs". http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html
gadders 14y ago
TBH, Lotus Notes as of right now is probably not a fantastic solution to whatever problem you may have. However, I think it is largely a mistake to judge software that was state of the art from 15+ years ago by today's standards. In those days, most databases didn't really handle replication particularly well. Notes was the most fully-featured in that respect. In addition network speeds and bandwiths were lower than they are now, so it wasn't really feasible for a global company to have everybody hit a single database instance. Lotus Notes programming was simple, so if you could write a Lotus or Excel macro, you could create a database for your team. This made it popular for semi-technical end users. It also pre-dates HTML, so web browsers and thin clients weren't really available. Having said all that, I'd still take Notes over Sharepoint :-)
acomjean 14y ago
I was a Notes programer at IBM over 10 years ago now, Notes is really misunderstood. Oddly most people think of Notes as just an email/calendaring tool and not for making useful databases for helping to collaborate/ run a business. Having put the Notes programming thing behind me, looking into NOSQL had me thinking this looks familiar. The notes platform at IBM was used to build out custom apps. I was a coop student employee and built them a lot of custom apps. its amazing how those custom tools can really help get stuff done. You can also see why its not such a great email client (email is just another database no matter how much customization they do). I used Notes as an email client at another job and it has gotten better over the years, its still clunky. lotus-script left a lot to be desired.
rjzzleep 14y ago
when was berkley db built? this whole nosql discussion bores me. not to mention that graph databases which is also part of that nosql talk originated in the 70s?
- klint 14y ago
  As noted in the OP, Berkeley DB was released in 1991 (see the sidebar). Neo4j, a graph database, was also mentioned.
marshray 14y ago
Wow, I remember playing on the PLATO at U of I when I was a kid. This article calls it a "mainframe", but my perception was that it was smaller than that. I'd always thought PLATO was primary an educational computing experiment. Good to know that people got other technology out of it too.
ollysb 14y ago
I worked on an OLAP based product until 3 years ago. The source data was in a lotus notes application that was updated by nearly 100 different researchers. We imported the lotus notes data into our data warehouse every night. I can't tell you how many times we had problems because data had been entered in a different format. Schema-less might have it's place but I definitely wasn't seeing the benefits on that job!

75 points by materialhero 14y ago

What with the shelf-life of software being so short, it's very easy to forget how programs that are now almost universally hated, derided, and synonymous with "large, bloated corporations" (i.e., Lotus Notes) at one time represented the state-of-the-art in software engineering.

dagw 14y ago
I worked with Notes and Domino quite a bit back in 97-98 and my memories of it from that time are mostly positive. We used it for writing fairly ad-hoc documentation and workflow management tools and also turning these into in-house web apps. It also integrated very nicely with Lotus 1-2-3 and made it easy to produce custom reports as spreadsheets with nice graphs and tables. It was surprisingly smooth and easy to work with compared to anything else at the time (and in many ways compared to most things that came after). I haven't looked at Notes since 98, but I've occasionally been tempted to take a look at later version to see how a tool I really quite liked managed to turn itself into the most hated software in the industry.
- lifebeyondfife 14y ago
  Used it back in 2006 for company email, policy documents and software issue tracking - both enhancements, bugs etc. raised by product management, development and client facing services. It was a mess. A slow, grinding mess of unusable screens and panels. If you end up typing things in an external text editor simply to copy-and-paste it in just to guarantee you don't lose your work, you know something has gone terribly wrong. Got a friend whose company were recently bought by IBM and they "eat their own dog food". He's not happy to be now using Lotus Notes.
  - johnward 14y ago
    Hehe maybe your friend and I are at the same place. I feel the same way...
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    I don't think anybody is happy "dogfooding" a product. It sends the message that your function isn't that essential.
    - skrebbel 14y ago
      which is why, at GitHub, they use Visual SourceSafe for all their configuration management.
- scott_s 14y ago
  My guess, as someone who uses Notes everyday, is that its primary purpose now is an email and calendar application. Its richer capabilities are generally not needed, and add friction to normal email and calendar use.
- nsxwolf 14y ago
  I started my developer career on Lotus Notes 4 back in 98. It offered a real platform at a time when web applications weren't exactly trivial to create. You could easily build database driven applications and deploy them instantly to the entire organization. Lotus and Domino were very forward looking products. I know the conventional wisdom from users is that they were terrible, but I'll always have fond memories of working with the technology.
  - zaphar 14y ago
    My sense from friends and colleagues who have used or developed for Lotus notes is that Users generally hated it but people developing apps for it loved it. I've always assumed the technology was solid but like most things in the category of custom one-off but long lived software for companies the UI/UX was almost always subpar.
    - DeepDuh 14y ago
      I think you nailed it. Notes apps that aren't developed with some strong UI guidelines tend to look ugly. It's a bit like web 1.0 in terms of UI - good developers can make neat and useful applications with it, but most of the stuff just looks bad since useful guidelines weren't there yet when the tools have first been developed.
  - gadders 14y ago
    v4.0? Luxury :-) I started on 3.01 with no scripting. I was at Lotusphere when Mozzie Shore (sp?) demo-ed Notes 4 and got a standing ovation.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    I've still been developing for Lotus Notes as a side job during my studies - it's still very big in Europe. Developing, administering (and to some extent using) classic notes applications is still a breeze. The reason why it's so hated is most probably the direction IBM took it in. It should have neve been marketed as a messaging application. Imagine a megacorp buying Evernote and turning it into an Messaging client - that's basically what happened from what I get. The 8.x eclipse made everything worse by adding another layer on top of the old C libraries and not replacing anything. It also broke the old mantra of 'everything is a notes db/document' which is a major point of why it worked so well together - similar to Unix.
- Torgo 14y ago
  Your experience definitely doesn't match mine. That said, I was not doing the same sort of work as you, so I will mostly limit my complaints about Notes to general usability. If someone is getting specific functionality out of Notes they couldn't get anywhere else, I can see somebody overlooking all of this. I don't remember what year I started using Lotus Notes, it was at least 1995, I was using it on Windows 95 and on Windows 3.11. I was working summers during college. What's incredible about Lotus Notes is how we're now in 2012 and it still has some of the same bugs, same UI weirdness, and it's still pretty much just as slow. I think it's hated for pretty straightforward reasons, things like how it doesn't conform to your operating system's usability guidelines, it still more or less acts like the mainframe application it was derived from; so when you'd press F5 to refresh it would instead close the window (if you want to refresh, you have to press the square in the corner, where you know there's an invisible widget that refreshes--you just know because you've used it for so long.) There's that weird tile screen where you click a tile and it indents like a button being pressed, but then just stays there and does nothing--why??? It's slow no matter how fast your computer is. It crashes. For years when it crashed you had to completely restart your computer of Lotus refused to run (who remembers when KillNotes was invented so you didn't have to do this???) It does things in just plain weird ways that cause weird side-effects, like how selecting multiple documents to delete would clear your clipboard. Bugs that seem unacceptable for an enterprise project, like when I would reply to someone and it would send the reply back to me instead of the sender. Or how selecting documents to archive and archiving them only archives about 85 percent of them, so you get in the habit of selecting the same batch to archive, over and over, as it progressively successfully archives only a portion of the documents you selected, until they are finally all archived. These are only a few complaints, there are many more. I used Lotus Notes at every job between then almost all the way up until now. Some things got a little better; they fixed a bunch of the bugs, when it (only occasionally now) crashes you don't have to restart your computer. F5 doesn't close your window. You almost never see that near-useless tile screen. And there are the things that Lotus Notes has always done right, like how it's had built in signing and encryption since forever. And the document store, as is the original point of the article, was pretty cool at the time, but IMO you really needed an Notes expert to keep it all together for your business, where document stores now are pretty easy. Sorry if this was long and negative. But every time there is discussion about Lotus Notes I feel compelled to talk about my long term experiences as a user (as opposed to admin, or content creator) of it. I think there is definitely a reason it is hated.
- omh 14y ago
  I'm a (reluctant) Notes/Domino admin at a small company. We use it for email and a few small apps. My impressions of where it went "wrong": * It was built before a lot of de-facto standards for UIs came about. So it uses different buttons, shortcuts, styles and UI paradigms compared to other software (mainly Office). This creates friction for most users. Unfortunately they can't "fix" it without irritating the users who've got used to the traditional Lotus way. * It got too complicated for ordinary users to develop their own apps. So instead of all the users being familiar with its power (and so understanding of its weaknesses), 99% of users just know it as a "buggy email client" * IBM gave up on expanding its power or fixing any of its bugs, and instead just treat it as a cash cow for the companies which are still using it.
  - agumonkey 14y ago
    Curious since they made a big port onto Eclipse, was it unworthy in terms of evolution ?
  - yuhong 14y ago
    AFAIK they are finally doing a major new release with a beta coming soon: http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-notesdomino-9-social-edition-public-beta-planned-for-december-14 http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-notesdomino...
- gadders 14y ago
  The thing that people forget is that 15-20 years ago when it first came out, you couldn't really replicate databases easily and having everybody in a global company access one database in, say, New York was a non-starter.

scott_s 14y ago

“NoSQL” is a misnomer. NoSQL databases aren’t designed to abandon SQL, the structured query language used pull information from traditional databases such as Oracle and MySQL. A better name would be “non-relational database.” NoSQL databases don’t use the neat tables of data that underpin relational databases. Thank you. I've been beating that drum for a while. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284)

johnward 14y ago
I'm not experienced with NoSQL but the name has confused me ever since I've read about it. I believe it stands for "Not only SQL" but the abbreviation really seems to hint that it abandons all SQL.
- icebraining 14y ago
  As far as I know, "not only SQL" is a backronym, coined because of that confusion.
  - scott_s 14y ago
    I suspect that is correct, as it seems that "NoSQL" was a glib name for an informal meeting (http://nosql.eventbrite.com/ http://nosql.eventbrite.com/), and was not necessarily intended to live on.
    - klint 14y ago
      Yep, as briefly mentioned in the OP: http://blog.sym-link.com/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name.html http://blog.sym-link.com/2009/10/30/nosql_whats_in_a_name.ht...
jfb 14y ago
An actual relational database not bound to the SQL nightmare would be something interesting indeed.

icebraining 14y ago

Meanwhile, non-relational databases go back at least to in '60s and predate the relational model. http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.html http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.h...

reginaldo 14y ago

There's a nice Stack Overflow podcast[1] on the same subject, where Damien Katz talks a little about what he liked on Lotus Notes. I thought it was a nice episode. [1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/

omh 14y ago

Somewhat related: Damien Katz has a brilliant blog post describing his experiences rewriting the Lotus Notes formula engine, and dealing with the "bugs". http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html

gadders 14y ago

TBH, Lotus Notes as of right now is probably not a fantastic solution to whatever problem you may have. However, I think it is largely a mistake to judge software that was state of the art from 15+ years ago by today's standards. In those days, most databases didn't really handle replication particularly well. Notes was the most fully-featured in that respect. In addition network speeds and bandwiths were lower than they are now, so it wasn't really feasible for a global company to have everybody hit a single database instance. Lotus Notes programming was simple, so if you could write a Lotus or Excel macro, you could create a database for your team. This made it popular for semi-technical end users. It also pre-dates HTML, so web browsers and thin clients weren't really available. Having said all that, I'd still take Notes over Sharepoint :-)

acomjean 14y ago

I was a Notes programer at IBM over 10 years ago now, Notes is really misunderstood. Oddly most people think of Notes as just an email/calendaring tool and not for making useful databases for helping to collaborate/ run a business. Having put the Notes programming thing behind me, looking into NOSQL had me thinking this looks familiar. The notes platform at IBM was used to build out custom apps. I was a coop student employee and built them a lot of custom apps. its amazing how those custom tools can really help get stuff done. You can also see why its not such a great email client (email is just another database no matter how much customization they do). I used Notes as an email client at another job and it has gotten better over the years, its still clunky. lotus-script left a lot to be desired.

rjzzleep 14y ago

when was berkley db built? this whole nosql discussion bores me. not to mention that graph databases which is also part of that nosql talk originated in the 70s?

klint 14y ago
As noted in the OP, Berkeley DB was released in 1991 (see the sidebar). Neo4j, a graph database, was also mentioned.

marshray 14y ago

Wow, I remember playing on the PLATO at U of I when I was a kid. This article calls it a "mainframe", but my perception was that it was smaller than that. I'd always thought PLATO was primary an educational computing experiment. Good to know that people got other technology out of it too.

ollysb 14y ago

I worked on an OLAP based product until 3 years ago. The source data was in a lotus notes application that was updated by nearly 100 different researchers. We imported the lotus notes data into our data warehouse every night. I can't tell you how many times we had problems because data had been entered in a different format. Schema-less might have it's place but I definitely wasn't seeing the benefits on that job!