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Topic: Open Source

Oracle inspires an open source NoSQL tea party

Summary: Appropriately enough this started in Boston with an event called NoSQL Live that was completely sold out.

Dana Blankenhorn

By Dana Blankenhorn for Linux and Open Source |

Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems -- and thus mySQL -- has inspired a sort of tea party movement among open source advocates organized under the banner of NoSQL.

(This tea party, in San Francisco, was photographed by the good people at Laughing Squid, a Web hosting company.)

Appropriately enough this started in Boston with an event called  NoSQL Live that was completely sold out.

Projects like MongoDB, Apache's CouchDB, and Apache Cassandra all presented their stuff at NoSQL Live. Major database users like Twitter, Digg, SourceForge, and GitHub all say they're on board with the idea. Hundreds attended the live webcast.

It gets more serious Monday, as 10gen announces a services and support business model built around MongoDB. This is primarily a Silicon Alley shop, with co-founders Dwight Merriman (DoubleClick), Eliot Horowitz, (ShopWiki), and Kevin Ryan (AlleyCorp). The roll-out includes a MongoDB Day tomorrow and an event in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Now, NoSQL has its critics. What good tea party doesn't? Code Monkeyism points to the dark ad hoc nature of NoSQL. BJ Clark of Marked as Pertinent says it's not that easy to scale. Eric Florenzano has a skeptical review of the players.

Maybe we shouldn't bring up science and natural forces at a tea party (sentence first, trial later), but all this does strike me as a natural reaction. Fear of lock-in, not just by vendors but by technologies like SQL, is built into the open source movement's DNA. It's a good thing.

Tea, anyone?

Topics: Open Source, Oracle

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  • Fear of lock in to SQL a mistake

    "Fear of lock-in, not just by vendors but by technologies like SQL, is built into the open source movement?s DNA. It?s a good thing." No, you should not fear SQL any more than you should fear TCP/IP, C, Linux or any other de-facto technology standard that has revolutionized computing. It is NOT an improvement to go back to the days before SQL became ubiquitous, when you had to write program code to tell the system how to do its job (to join tables and perform the actual data retrieval) instead of specifying what needs to be done in a high-level descriptive language. WHY is it a good thing to fear using SQL, especially considering that there is a good open source implementation in PostgreSQL?
    steve@...
    Reply Vote

    • I keep wondering why more people don't adopt and write with PostgreSql..

      It is a great database system and probably more robust and more standards based than even MySql.

      I'm developing a system which uses PostgreSQL and if it (the system) becomes accepted and used widely on the web, it would potentially become one of the biggest databases on the internet, perhaps even rivaling what Google or Microsoft can handle. My hope is that Postgres will be able to handle the requirements in the future.
      adornoe
      Reply Vote

  • Forget reinventing the wheel

    Use SQL standards to avoid lock-in. nuf said.
    happyharry_z
    Reply Vote

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    efsane
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    zakkiromi
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  • RE: Oracle inspires an open source NoSQL tea party

    Appropriately enough this started in Boston with an event called NoSQL Live that was completely sold <a href="http://wposfv.com/"><font color="black">education news</font></a> and out.<a href="http://ipadbagblog.com/"><font color="white"> k</font></a><a href="http://www.sutudeg.org/"><font color="white"> l</font></a>
    edward polling
    Reply Vote
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