http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660tabular != Relational. All structured data is Relational in many different ways, some which one taps into for data integrity in a database. Unstructured data is essentially useless in computation because it is basically chaotic data where structure cannot be found. Without any kind of structure, there can be no computation. And, ssemi-structured data is just a handwaiving cop-out for devs too afraid to pick a friggin' schema. :) Like many other terms in the "NoSQL" movement, from the movement's name onwards, this one is one of the worst. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment11http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment11Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:54:10 GMT"...like asking how to feed a car, because you are used to riding horses..." Pure gold! Sorry Ayende, I'll be stealing that line and using it in a conversation someday. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment10http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment10Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:32:03 GMTDefinitely true, if someone is taking the NoSQL approach expecting it's "like SQL but better" then they have some reading to do. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment9http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment9Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:16:32 GMTJustin, Depending on what DB you are using Raven has an embedded option, the others, I don't think so http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment8http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment8Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:47:59 GMT@Justin Depends on the client. You can access CouchDB directly with an Ajax, Silverlight or Flash app since they provide a JSON+HTTP interface. Otherwise most NoSQL db's (like Redis) are built to handle thousands of concurrent connections so you can access it via a un-impended client like WPF/WinForms/C++ etc if your firewall permits. I imagine it will also work in Silverlight if you change the server port that its listening to the Silverlight approved range. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment7http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment7Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:32:59 GMTQuestion, can you access through an API directly in code? Meaning no web-server involved? http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment6http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment6Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:19:32 GMTHah nice comic. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment5http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment5Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:03:56 GMTFor all interested, the CouchDB maintainer has just made a very well written post on what 'NoSQL is About…' including a high-level overview of the benefits of the leading implementations at: [http://blog.couch.io/post/511008668/nosql-is-about](http://blog.couch.io/post/511008668/nosql-is-about) http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment4http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment4Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:26:36 GMT@Rafal Devs just need to be educated about their available options and the strengths and weaknesses of each. I've been on projects of teams building long running process services (effectively like a queue of complex requests) where a majority of their efforts were spent trying to awkwardly shoe-horn their offline requests into an RDBMS instead of spending their time concentrating on the core business process logic. This could've been easily replaced with a one-liner using something like db4o. As usual pick the best tool for the job. When your data is not tabular/relational and you don't need rich querying then most of the time there are better solutions to be using than an RDBMS. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment3http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment3Sat, 10 Apr 2010 14:09:28 GMTI can see the bright future of NoSQL databases. First, vendors provide tooling for browsing, querying and fixing the data. Then they agree on some industry standards for document format, storage, indexing and querying of NoSql databases. Then they design a universal data manipulation language and call it a NoSQL'2012 and we'll have made a full circle back to SQL. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment2http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment2Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:46:01 GMTAgreed, I read that as well and couldn't see how he's problems he was having with ZODB was related to the current NoSQL databases. It is true that most of the technologies are new and most lack a good GUI atm however by design they have a very flat structure that facilitate easy access to your data with a rich set of programmatic or command line access. Most of the time the values are strings and complex types are persisted using the simple and ubiquitous JSON format. I believe that most of the problems are solved using clear text, self describing serialization format. I can see why you have chosen to implement your own queueing implementation (I've chosen to do the same as well). Out of all the mq implementations I have used, MSMQ is the most limiting and lacking that it doesn't support even the basic MQ Enterprise Integration Patters (book by M. Fowler) . For corporate environments I would recommend RabbitMQ, however it has been announced that the original designers of the open AMQP spec are abandoning it in favour of a simpler one which you can find at: [http://www.zeromq.org](http://www.zeromq.org) - so I guess its worth considering as well. http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment1http://ayende.com/4458/re-nosql-meh#comment1Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:45:18 GMT