[Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

On 8/1/2012 9:12 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> Oh no! Don't buy in to the No-SQL nonsense.

I'm not.  NoSQL is a buzzword for a class of high-performance 
non-relational database designs.  It's not the only non-relational 
philosophy out there and it's certainly not one that I consider "best" 
but I'm biased against data loss.


> Why don't they scale?

The time taken to perform a query against a table increases roughly 
linearly with the number of rows in the query and the complexity of the 
query.  This degradation continues until the limits of the hardware are 
reached.  At that point the whole thing slows to an unusable crawl and 
maybe the system crashes.  Even Oracle's Exadata frames will crash and 
burn under sufficient load.


> You say there are more robust, flexible, and scalable ways of storing
> data. Like what? How is it *not* a "table?"

There are plenty of examples of object-oriented and distributed 
databases that I could use as examples.  The most common of the former 
are things like medical records and financial histories.

Robust: In addition to ACID, object databases can provide versioning of 
objects within data stores.

Flexible: Object databases provide for arbitrarily complex data 
structures.  Objects can be nested and they can be arranged 
hierarchically.  Classes provide a variety of object types within a 
database.  Objects can even be ordered as rows and columns if you so desire.

Scalable: Objects can be addressed directly.  Searches and joins aren't 
needed.  This means that object retrieval never takes more than a given 
amount of time regardless of the data store size.  Caveat: there are 
exceptions to this but they are rare.

DNS is the most widely-used of the latter.

-- 
Rich P.