Planning for Big Data

Chapter 8. The NoSQL Movement

By Mike Loukides

In a conversation last year, Justin Sheehy, CTO of Basho, described NoSQL as a movement, rather than a technology. This description immediately felt right; I’ve never been comfortable talking about NoSQL, which when taken literally, extends from the minimalist Berkeley DB (commercialized as Sleepycat, now owned by Oracle) to the big iron HBase, with detours into software as fundamentally different as Neo4J (a graph database) and FluidDB (which defies description).

But what does it mean to say that NoSQL is a movement rather than a technology? We certainly don’t see picketers outside Oracle’s headquarters. Justin said succinctly that NoSQL is a movement for choice in database architecture. There is no single overarching technical theme; a single technology would belie the principles of the movement.

Think of the last 15 years of software development. We’ve gotten very good at building large, database-backed applications. Many of them are web applications, but even more of them aren’t. “Software architect” is a valid job description; it’s a position to which many aspire. But what do software architects do? They specify the high level design of applications: the front end, the APIs, the middleware, the business logic--the back end? Well, maybe not.

Since the 80s, the dominant back end of business systems has been a relational database, whether Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. That’s not much of an architectural choice. Those are all great products, ...