MongoDB chief: It will be mixed SQL-NoSQL world

Summary: MongoDB's chief developer and 10gen CEO Dwight Merriman said NoSQL technologies are very agile and scalable but is no substitute for SQL when doing complex transactions, reporting and BI. And he added that he did not coin and does not like the term NoSQL

By Paula Rooney for Linux and Open Source | July 26, 2011 -- 11:13 GMT (04:13 PDT)

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MongoDB's chief developer and 10gen CEO said NoSQL is very agile and scalable but is no substitute for SQL when doing complex transactions, reporting and BI.

During his keynote at OSCON 2011 today, 10gen CEO Dwight Merriman said enterprise customers will probably adopt a mixed bag of database technologies -- both SQL and NoSQL -- for different workloads.

And he took exception to the term NoSQL, which has become widely used to describe his MondoDB's document-oriented storage solution.

"It's not a one siz fits all anymore," Merriman said during his keynote at the Portland, Oregon conference, which was streamed live over the Internet today. "One will use multiple technologies. If I were a CTO, I'd want to use NoSQL for scalable high performance operational data access, lots of reads and writes at high speed and [for] semi real-time and low latency for end users," he said. "And you need another for reporting and BI. These [NoSQL] technologies are not optimal for that. In general, a classic data warhouse is a good solution for those things."

He did not coin the term NoSQL and he doesn't seem to like it. The point of MongoDB is to address massive scale out needs of document-oriented storage -- and making development in this space better.

"Making development easier and more elegant is just a big a property [to MongoDB to gain as scale out," said Merriman, the former DoubleClick founder.

Merriman did predict that some of the holes in MongoDB and other so-called NoSQL solutions will be addressed -- but he pushed the notion that it will be a mixed SQL/noSQL world for some time to come.

"Over time, the way we do aggregation is improving ... with Hive and other higher level abstraction layers," he said. 'If there is a gap, it'll go away or be smaller. But reporting is something you'll miss today."

Topics: Enterprise Software, CXO

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3 comments

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Hmmph. NoSQL seems to answer a MySQL or PostGre Need

But not an Oracle or SQL Server need. Those servers don't need the performance boost.

Mac_PC_FenceSitter

26 July, 2011 11:31

Reply Vote

Makes sense

There is no reason to store documents, application settings or user settings in a traditional DBMS. NoSQL type stuff would be perfect for that.

bmonsterman

27 July, 2011 06:57

Reply Vote

RE: MongoDB chief: It will be mixed SQL-NoSQL world

From in the article:
"NoSQL is very agile and scalable but is no substitute for SQL when doing complex transactions, reporting and BI.

This is very refreshing. I've read many posts on various forums, and a few articles as well, stating that transactional database management systems (e.g., Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Teradata, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) are dead and relegated to legacy systems. Use the right tool for the job at hand.

And as far as the 'NoSQL' name goes, that is really not completely appropriate as the Apache Cassandra project has developed it's own SQL-like language, Cassandra Query Language, as a means for database engineers and data analysts to interact with Cassandra in a more familiar way.