Dr. Richard Hipp gave a talk at Southeast Linux Fest today on choosing an open-source database. He thinks that NoSQL is not a very good name for the new databases we’re seeing these days, so he proposed a new name: postmodern databases. Why postmodern?

• The absence of objective truth
• Queries return opinions, not facts

I thought this was the best proposal I’ve heard for an alternative to the NoSQL moniker. And this is not bashing — the absence of objective truth can actually be an enabling quality, not necessarily a drawback. There’s a lot to compliment about the new databases, and calling them NoSQL is really a disservice — like calling a car a horseless carriage.

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Last weekend, my brother and I attended SELF 2009. A few thoughts on it:

The mixture of sessions was interesting. There were some really good ones. I think the best session I attended was an OpenSolaris/NetBeans/Glassfish/Virtualbox/ZFS session, given by a Sun employee. He was an excellent presenter, and really showed off the strengths of the technologies in a nice way. He started up enough VMs to make his OpenSolaris laptop chew into swap, and I thought it was fun to see how it dealt with that. I’ve heard Solaris and OpenSolaris do a lot better at avoiding and managing swapping than GNU/Linux, but I couldn’t make any opinion from watching. I did think it was odd to have this session at a “Linux” (yes, they left off the GNU) conference. But I thought the session was a good addition to the conference. In other sessions, and in the hallways and expo, there was a lot more …