Infoworld: NoSQL needs Standards

Like Larry Ellison's yacht, the RDBMS is slowly sailing off into the sunset. But if NoSQL is going to take its place, a standard query language and APIs had better emerge soon. Go ahead, compete, but let's also raise the tide for all boats. Well, maybe not the SS Ellison. Not to worry, I'm sure he'll get by.

A decline for Oracle over the next 15 years is inevitable. It will be impossible to sustain the RDBMS-only paradigm against all logic as the new wave of databases lumped in under "NoSQL" and "Big Data" takes over. Oracle is responding with partnerships, and it already has a NoSQL database, but it's difficult to imagine a transition that leaves Oracle's revenue stream intact. Smells almost like Novell, circa 1996.

Yet the RDBMS will take its time to fade. The reason? Aside from the obvious -- it's an entrenched technology -- the advantages that made the RDBMS ubiquitous in the first place are going to keep it around a bit longer.

It may surprise you that I don't consider "transactions" to be one of those advantages. They've been overrated for some time. It's absurd to purport that a transaction, which must be too fine-grained to be useful across multiple request/response cycles, is an indispensible tool for most applications. Moreover, there are other ways to assure reasonable consistency.

...continued...

Read the rest of my article over at InfoWorld (minus the picture courtesy of Tara Fusco)..

After you're done. Please consider sending me ideas on other topics you'd like me to write about. I'm always looking for ideas.

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