Oracle NoSQL is unlikely to be a big deal
Alex Williams noticed that there will be a NoSQL session at Oracle OpenWorld next week, and is wondering whether this will be a big deal. I think it won’t be.
There really are three major points to NoSQL.
- Dynamic schemas. This is the only one of the three that truly depends on NoSQL.
- Scale-out short-request processing. If you want to scale out efficiently at high request volumes, you’re best off not using all the flexibility SQL/relational DBMS offer. (In particular, you don’t want to do cross-node joins). Not coincidentally, a number of the best scale-out offerings were built to be NoSQL.
- Open source. Doing a relational DBMS is a big project. It seems easier to build NoSQL ones.
Oracle can address the latter two points as aggressively as it wishes via MySQL. It so happens I would generally recommend MySQL enhanced by dbShards, Schooner, and/or dbShards/Schooner, rather than Oracle-only MySQL … but that’s a detail. In some form or other, Oracle’s MySQL is a huge player in the scale-out, open source, short-request database management market.
So that leaves us with dynamic schemas. Oracle has at least four different sets of technology in that area:
- As Workday noticed years ago, MySQL can be used as a functional, basic key-value store.
- Oracle also has XML-based Berkeley DB/SleepyCat kicking around.*
- The XML extensions to Oracle’s core DBMS could be alleged to have a dynamic schema/NoSQL flavor. (Blech.)
- A dynamic schema argument could also be made for object-oriented DBMS technology. While Oracle doesn’t to my knowledge exactly sell that, it does have the Tangosol Coherence line of technology, with a potentially similar programming model.
If Oracle is now refreshing and rebranding one or more of these as “NoSQL”, there’s no reason to view that as a big deal at all.
*That’s Mike Olson’s former company, if you’re keeping score at home.
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13 Responses to “Oracle NoSQL is unlikely to be a big deal”
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I think you are missing a few points here. NoSQL is not replacement for rdbms. It’s to fill the gaps after rdbms. NoSQL is closer to developers and they will (almost) always choose solution which is open and cheap (!). It’s about hosting – companies are migrating from expensive in premises solution to hosted solution and then please show me amongst biggest hosting companies who uses Oracle ? NoSQL matters to Oracle very much as Oracle may have spotted they are like dinosaur: big, slow with lots of … relations that slow them down even more, still powerful though 🙂
Chris,
Given your view of the reasons to adopt NoSQL — why would Oracle ever offer a NoSQL product NoSQL adopters would choose to adopt?
For example to have influence on nosql “standard” whatever it’s going to be as nosql changes they way how application are design and written. This shift at some point may reach their legacy markets. Remember that change comes from the bottom not from the top.
[…] industry analyst and advisor Curt Monash speculates that it will have little […]
[…] of a NoSQL solution at Oracle Open World 2011 has produced a fair amount of discussion. Curt Monash blogged about it some days ago, and so did Dan Abadi. A great description of the new offering (Dan credits […]
Any pricing details on this? I understand they have a opensource offering. Thanks, ..rao
Nothing jumps to mind on pricing, licensing, etc.
Anyhow, I see Oracle NoSQL more as a technology to put out press releases and marketing collateral about than as something people will actually use.
Daniel Abadi now has a lot more information on Oracle’s NoSQL offering: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2011/10/overview-of-oracle-nosql-database.html
The comments really add to the thread, as they often do on this blog as well.
[…] asked me for some thoughts on Oracle’s new NoSQL product. For the most part, I stand by my previous comments on Oracle NoSQL. Still, NoSQL in general deserves a place in Oracle shops, so it makes sense for Oracle to try to […]
[…] http://www.dbms2.com/2011/09/30/oracle-nosql/ […]
[…] http://www.dbms2.com/2011/09/30/oracle-nosql/ […]
I have been thinking about a model for XML data management that uses the relational underpinnings for “search data” (whatever that means). and returns the XML structured data natively as it was inserted. Then use stylesheets to perform the projections over the data prior to returning it. So you get the clever query optimization behavior from the “metadata” together with the flexibility of the XML structured data on the retrieval side. It seems like an interesting compromise (especially since the data that I am managing can’t be converted easily into MongoDB because the resultant documents are too big).I can’t see any obvious downsides just yet, so would be interested in your thoughts. Oh, and the reason the post is on this thread is that my client is looking at doing this using Oracle RAC with the XML capabilities. Up until that moment, I was reasonably confident, now I am less sure. Thoughts?
Thanks
Not totally sure what you’re suggesting here, Chris. Why isn’t the obvious choice MarkLogic 6?
Best,
CAM