David.Poole (9/21/2010)

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I've done a lot of reading around NoSQL. First of all it stands for Not Only SQL and not NO SQL!

There are a number of NoSQL solutions who claim to be web scalable but when you dig under the covers not so many are. It's worth looking at Simon Munro's blog on the subject. Simon spoke well at the SQL Bits conference in London earlier this year.

The premise of NoSQL is that for applications where data loss is not the end of the world then the overhead of an RDBMS is overkill. They work on the principle of BASE rather than ACID (Basically Available, Soft state, Eventually Consistent).

Quest software are even releasing a version of TOAD that can talk to cloud DBs and some NoSQL contenders.

Where NoSQL is particularly useful is for complex web forms processing where a customer can ping back and forth through the user journey to suit themselves. You really wouldn't want to be trying that with a relational schema as it would require loads of nullable fields and a lot of update statements.

Until the form is completed there is no need to commit the data to an RDBMS. Service interruptions are rare enough that a missed form is not the end of the world. If we committed data into an RDBMS then such service interruptions would result in orphaned data and other data quality issues.

At present the NoSQL solutions I have seen are very much programmers databases rather than everymans databases though TOAD should at least be a step on the right path.