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.
“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.”
