Max's Output

There is a huge hype about relational databases (MySQL) versus NoSQL systems (Cassandra). After the Digg’s successful migration in September 2009 and Twitter announcement in March 2010 the whole Web has become insanely mad about Cassandra. “NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin!” is just one of hundreds of blog posts on the topic.

As there is a number of successful migrations to Cassandra (Digg is not the only example) and the fact that Facebook has been using it for years we can conclude that it just works. On the other hand, Cassandra has clearly not reached its maturity yet (you can easily feel it by trying to install Cassandra and looking at their stop-server script). There is still not enough understanding of all prons and cons of using it. So how widely will it be adopted for Web applications is still an open question – for more on this read “I Can’t Wait for NoSQL to Die”.

It is interesting that from the very beginning of the NoSQL movement enterprise software companies pay attention also. Of cause they are not talking about Cassandra yet but they are definitely interested in the Amazon Dynamo’s principals on which Cassandra is based. For example, read “Principles for Inconsistency” from SAP. So we can expect NoSQL hype to expand to Enterprise Software soon. As Amazon Dynamo uses MySQL or Berkeley Database as a storage we might foresee Enterprise Version of Cassandra using Oracle or DB2 as a storage. Is it where we are going now? LOL