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Enterprise NoSQL: Silver Bullet or Poison Pill?
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by Billy Newport on Jan 20, 2011 |
51:14

Summary
Billy Newport explains the fundamental differences between SQL and NoSQL, creating awareness that NoSQL is not suited for many cases, and people should make informed decisions before buying into it.

Bio

Billy Newport is a Distinguished Engineer working on WebSphere eXtreme Scale (ObjectGrid) and on WebSphere high availability. He's worked at IBM since Sept 2001. Besides his current activities, he helped add advanced APIs like the WorkManager APIs (JSR 236/237) and worked on the staff plugin architecture of WPS.

Strange Loop is a developer-run software conference. Innovation, creativity, and the future happen in the magical nexus "between" established areas. Strange Loop eagerly promotes a mix of languages and technologies in this nexus, bringing together the worlds of bleeding edge technology, enterprise systems, and academic research. Of particular interest are new directions in data storage, alternative languages, concurrent and distributed systems, front-end web, semantic web, and mobile apps.

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Community comments

Impressive talk! by Andreas Mueller

You know your stuff, Billy! :-)

Re: Impressive talk! by Vlad Didenko

He knows his stuff. Yes, but not much around it. FUD talk.

Data centric vs question centric by Jaroslaw Palka

That's the essence of this talk

Re: Impressive talk! by Billy Newport

Well
Thats the fine line here. I designed and sell a nosql type product with IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale. It's absolutely in my interest to see this deployed and used in enterprises. People are reading about the various .coms using it and raving about it. Peoples expectations or knowledge levels vary wildly between .com culture and the enterprise world. The point of the talk wasn't to push SQL or NoSQL, it was simply to spread some of the insider knowledge on whats a good fit for either.

I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm pushing an agenda here against NoSQL. It's the opposite, I just want to see a more educated decision when enterprise architects select this technology. Remember, we need success stories in the enterprise for this to really take off. A few publicized failures possibly because of bad uses cases is bad news for everyone.

Re: Data centric vs question centric by Billy Newport

Yes, I think once people grasp that and realize that sharded architectures become more key centric and less query centric than they may be used to with conventional DBMS's then we'll all sleep better at night

Re: Impressive talk! by Thomas Santana

I think it's not so much FUD. He points the fact that not knowing what you are getting into may be harmful. The presentation has some valid points and ways around. The comparison between how you think SQL and how to thing data-grids is very helpful. Another good tip is getting visibility of SOR (Systems of Records). He also points that consistency may not be an issue in all the cases, but has to be discussed. How to handle transactions is interesting too, and he actually showed how SQL way of handling locking can be an issue.

All in all I think he has some very interesting point to consider when looking at becoming Not Only SQL.

Enjoyed it a lot by Hermann Schmidt

I really appreciated Billy's emphasis on deep thinking about what the nature of your problem is before choosing a technology. As obvious as this may sound, it is as much ignored in practice as it is vital for project success.

I especially enjoyed the part about "skill level", which is not related to NoSQL in particular, but bears lots of wisdom.

NoSQL does not make life easier. There are even more choices to make and mechanisms to understand than before. Life became more complex once again for developers.
The talk left no doubt about this.

Re: Enjoyed it a lot by john czerwiec

The decisions ought to be less and less at developer level and more and more at the "architect with business domain level understanding".

If such choices are made without the appropriate input of business analysts, infrastructure teams and integration specialists the end result will "showcase" the shortcomings of new approaches.

Great talk! by Nicholas Piasecki

Really enjoyed the content of this talk. Very pragmatic and insightful.

Great template by pablo p

Are the presentation template and fonts available somewhere?
Thanks

Re: Great template by Alex Miller

That's the standard Parchment template from Apple Keynote. The font is Papyrus.

Re: Data centric vs question centric by Chandrasekhar S

Great talk Billy.

Talks makes one think before jumping into a NOSQL solution.

But I have a slight disagreement in the analogy made based on the queries like bank balance etc, NOSQL solutions never try to solve such problems or claim to be best fit for the scenarios where there business needs are more strict transactional in nature.So I wish if there was one slide which touch base where NOSQL solution's really fits in.

Re: Data centric vs question centric by Hans-Dieter Böhlau

Yes, I agree. And Bill is right to say that one should think about the usage scenarios of the data to be managed. Independent of an sql or nosql approach, you need a clearly defined responsibility to manage data structure and ways to access.
In scenarios you know, that your datamodel evolves over time and data access is done over an clearly defined api, you can deal with a no-schema approach on database level very well. But as Bill said, there different aspects to keep in mind when you define the data management architecture ...

Very Good by Randy Schnier

Informative but also entertaining at the same time. Had to chuckle during the anecdote on the scenario where everybody goes after the Cabbage Patch Row and then "the world ends" unless the app is designed intelligently from the beginning.

Re: Very Good by Tiberiu Fustos

Very good indeed! I was happy to get some real-life insights about applying the technology to other enterprise problems than the Facebook/Twitter category. I work in the telco space for some time. One thing that I noticed is that we already have a huge amount of data being replicated and than another huge effort to keep in sync somehow.
Forrester just named Master Data Management as a "hot" technology to reach maturity in 2011. I guess we will not get rid of the "system of record" for a long time to come. The search for the "source of truth" in enterprises with 500+ integrated applications is on-going.

Investing in maintaining all the logic in the applications and having for each use case a different representation of the same data (domain object, business object etc.) might actually lead increased costs compared to RDBMS while solving some other problems such as scalability. Need to think about it :-) And keep an eye on VoltDB...

Re: Impressive talk, indeed! by Mikhail Vladimirov

The highest information density per 1Hz of the talk I have seen lately. Delivered with surgical precision, too.

Re: Impressive talk! by Jeff Roughgarden

Billy, I both enjoyed and learned a lot from your talk. Outstanding! Thank you.

Insightful! by Carlos Perez

Very insightful and entertaining!

GigaSpaces is not a key value cache by Shay Hassidim

There is one very important note about GigaSpaces:
GigaSpaces is not a key/value cache. It was never a key/value cache since it was born from the JavaSpace specification. You can use it as a distributed map, but this will be using a fraction of its power.
GigaSpaces is a Documented oriented / Object SQL In-Memory-Data-Grid.
It support both POJO/PONO (.Net)/POCO (C++) objects as well Documents (XML/JSON).
It comes with Document API , JavaSpace , Map , JPA, JDBC , JDBC , memCache API and rest API.

Shay

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