In this session Rob Conery tried to show of the new Shiny toy “NoSQL” in as many forms as possible, discussing the pro’s and and some con’s. He based much of the talk on his experiences with building TekPub and the requirements they had around that. He tried to illustrate that this wasn’t a magical kingdom and refrained from the usual snake-oil selling techniques. So all in all a good presentation, content and comments below;
The talk
In his talk Rob talked and showed two types of “NoSql”-databases, the graph (object) and document kind. Rob categorized document databases as a storage with a bunch of JSON serialized to a bunch of BSON stored as key / value pair. For TekPub they where using MongoDB and that’s the tool he used in his recorded (o.O) demos. He had some neat .NET code that created Session-like containers for the MongoDB and it looked simple to communicate with.
Graph (or object databases) Rob categorized as storage by serialized binary blobs and used DB4O to demonstrate.
Both demo’s had abstractions that hid away how you really communicated with the databases and Rob talked more about the strengths and low-friction of the model, but it was really hard to see it from his demos because of the abstraction level and simple examples.
The conflict
A bit into the talk we hit a conflict. What about reporting? Can we do that with NoSQL databases? Most of them you can’t and Rob showed a strategy of storing copies of data in a relational database for using as a report store. This made it very clear that most NoSQL are for specific purposes and RDMBS are general purpose.
As a developer you also need to think differently and accept Eventual Consistency.
The discussion
I think Rob did a good job in introducing NoSQL to those who haven’t seen it, he also lifted one of the problems with the technology today, reporting. As most developers I like that there are new tech to solve my problems, NoSQL are interesting and as I said before I’ll play around with the tech. But as most hypes I’d be really careful in declaring the old king dead and the new king on the throne.
The NoSQL databases we see to day are good for very specific scenarios, they scale well and for have been serving large websites very well. They are immature though, tooling, infrastructure support and the overall eco-system are far behind the RDBMS product we have out there.
I like the idea to use “NoSQL” to feed web sites, similar to having data cached in memory or “read-copies” for our presentations, while still pushing data to better models for BI or support for business processes.
