I thing there's an explanation to the NoSQL movement and why non-rdbms are gaining popularity these days. Not a long time ago, if you had to handle 1 billion r

I thing there's an explanation to the NoSQL movement and why non-rdbms are gaining popularity these days. Not a long time ago, if you had to handle 1 billion records then you were already big with piles of $ sitting beside you. Then you would just call Oracle or Greenplum (or whatever) and say "Hey, I've got some million $ here, care for it? I just want to be fast(tm)" Lately it is quite possible to be small and forced to handle millions of records daily or struggle with new technologies that require less man power for development but need scaling a lot earlier (e.g Rails). You have limited resources and if you can get away with Tokyo Cabinet on a single machine instead of a 100k mysql cluster then you get to live longer. As any new cool technology it'll get some hype and then fall back to being the right tool for the job. It's good to have some alternatives to RDBMS, some problems are really not relational.