Enterprise NoSQL: Silver Bullet or Poison Pill?

You know your stuff, Billy! :-)

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

That's the essence of this talk

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Are the presentation template and fonts available somewhere?
Thanks

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

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.

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 ...

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.

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...

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

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

Very insightful and entertaining!

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