The No-SQL tag really lumps together a lot of concepts that are
in fact as distinct from eachother as they are from SQL/RDBMS.
An object store is not at all similar to Cassandra and
Hypertable, which is not at all like an column store. And when
looking at BigTable derivatives, it’s quite important to realise
that Google actually does joins in middle layers or apps, so
while BigTable does not have joins, the apps essentially do use
them – I’ve heard it professed that denormalising everything
might be a fab idea, but I don’t quite believe in that for all
cases, just like I don’t believe in ditching the structured form
of RDBMS being the solution.
SQL/RDBMS has had a few decades of dominance now, and has thus
become the great “general purpose” tool. With the ascent of all
the other tools, it’s definitely worthwhile to look at them, but
also realise that each (inluding SQL based ones) have their
place. Moving all your …
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