No to SQL? Open source rises up

Started by dhilipkumar, Jul 02, 2009, 09:54 PM

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dhilipkumar

No to SQL?Open source rises up

Open source rises up

The movement's chief champions are Web and Java developers, many of whom learned to get by at their cash-strapped startups without Oracle by building their own data storage solutions, emulating those being built by Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., and which they subsequently released as open source.

What is NoSQL (technically speaking)?
The names of these projects are as diverse as they are whimsical: Hadoop, Voldemort, Dynomite, and others.

But they are generally unified by a few things, including:
Don't call them databases. Amazon.com's CTO, Werner Vogels, refers to the company's influential Dynamo system as a "highly available key-value store." Google calls its BigTable, the other role model for many NoSQL adherents, a "distributed storage system for managing structured data."

They can blow through enormous amounts of data. Hypertable, an open-source column-based database modeled upon BigTable, is used by local search engine Zvents Inc. to write 1 billion cells of data per day, according to a presentation by Doug Judd (PDF document), a Zvents engineer.

computerworld

dhilipkumar

They run on clusters of cheap PC servers. PC clusters can be easily and cheaply expanded without the complexity and cost of "sharding," which involves cutting up databases into multiple tables to run on large clusters or grids.

Google has said that one of BigTable's bigger clusters manages as much as 6 petabytes of data across thousands of servers.

They beat performance bottlenecks. By sidestepping the time-consuming toil of translating Web or Java apps and data into a SQL-friendly format, NoSQL architectures perform much faster, say proponents.

"SQL is an awkward fit for procedural code, and almost all code is procedural," said Curt Monash, an independent database analyst and blogger. For data upon which users expect to do heavy, repeated manipulations, the cost of mapping data into SQL

No overkill. While conceding that relational databases offer an unparalleled feature set and a rock-solid reputation for data integrity, NoSQL proponents say this can be too much for their needs.

Take Adobe's ConnectNow, which, even without a database, makes three copies of users' session data while they are online -- data that is mostly deleted after logoff, said Sena.

Support by bootstrap
Because they are open source, NoSQL alternatives lack vendors offering formal support. That's no deal breaker to most proponents, who are plugged closely into this Silicon Valley-centric community and are thus comfortable with the bootstrap approach.

But some admitted that working without a formal "throat to choke" when things go wrong was scary, at least for their managers.

"We did have to do some selling," admitted Adobe's Sena. "But basically after they saw our first prototype was working, we were able to convince the higher-ups that this was the right way to go."

Sudhakar

Good info.

Keep posting some cool information's.
  :educated