NoSQL: Awesome tech with a stupid name
Recently I’ve been looking into new ways to deal with extremely large datasets. With Twitter and Digg making announcements recently that they’re migrating, or have migrated their operations to Cassandra, I’ve started to take a keen interest in NoSQL. NoSQL is a term that casts a wide net. In general it encompasses data stores that eschew the traditional relational database model in favor of distributed data stores. Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn and a host of others have all thrown their hats in the distributed data ring. I mention those companies specifically because all of them have built their own distributed database offerings to satisfy their particular needs. Google has BigTable, a propriety technology that has an open source flavor under the Apache Software Foundation project Hadoop called HBase. Amazon has Dynamo (even more proprietary). Facebook created Cassandra and open sourced it thankfully. And LinkedIn developed Voldemort (a great name if I do say so).  Twitter and more recently Digg.com have gotten behind Cassandra which has given that particular project (not even up to version 1.0 yet) a lot of press lately. I’ve started to dabble with Cassandra and HBase (really the whole Hadoop project) in an attempt to get familiar with technology but I keep coming back to something in my mind. That is that “NoSQL” is probably the stupidest possible name that could have been coined to describe all of these amazing technologies.