I’m just reviewing Oracle NoSQL database. This database is part of BigData and Oracle has an interesting view about the coexistence of NoSQL, Hadoop, Traditional SQL.
Check out this image:
Oracle view is really impressive and may become a real challenge.
Oracle claims to have a BASE compliant database but this seems not true. Reading documentation you can discover that sometimes eventual consistency model is not obeyed.
I’m also impressed from this technical aspect: ACID compliant transactions. Is this the first NoSQL database ACID compliant? Is Oracle able to deal against a paradigm? Is it able to change the theory? Of course not.
Support for atomic transactions is not provided in fact and this is in contrast with A of ACID.
Ending, I can suggest the interesting overview offered by Daniel Abadi, available here. Furthermore you may also check this cool link too.
Quoting a blog post of the 451 group we can do some remarks on NoSQL. First of all many person do not really know what is NoSQL and the worst of it is that many persons claim to be IT consultant does not really know anything about NoSQL; they simply think that NoSQL is a different kind of database that don’t use SQL language!
Second NoSQL is a widespread concept that has been used for different products without really leveraging the single functionalities; this has been caused market confusion and it haven’t helped the real diffusion of concept and use.
Probably only few persons known the theory behind NoSQL, the differences between BASE and ACID, te CAP theorem, the differences between NoSQL datastores, etc.
Also today you hear from many sources the term BigData. Do you know that BigData is a trademark of a company called SysTap ?
Furthermore the big problem of NoSQL in the enterprise: is the eventually consistent model applicable to your business?
I agree this title is misleading but problem is clear: today Oracle does not provide any product can compete with new cloud computing needs and with the NoSQL movement. It is not possibile to think that actually the RAC technology of oracle can be used in a cloud environment and also a cloud service cannot be deployed over an Exadata.
The acquisition of MySQL wasn’t of course the interest of Oracle in MySQL, but today MySQL might be used in a cloud environment with some tricks. Might as MySQL is not in fact a NoSQL database but can be adapted for this role. Oracle provide a plugin to integrate MySQL with Memcached that is widely used in NoSQL environment to solve the problem of data partitioning but IMHO is not enough.
A NoSQL database is not an old relational database (somebody might also complain about the real ACID compliance of MySQL) converted or readapted to support BASE properties instead ACID. The entire pattern is completely different.
Of course Oracle from its point of view try to say the NoSQL is really not needed as presented in this webcast. Moreover the famous Tom Kyte in his own blog Ask Tom answered to the topic NOSQL vs. RDBMS databases
However I can argue that the problem must be taken at a lower level. The CAP Theorem shows clearly that a standard RDBMS cannot be used in a real distributed environemnt; so there is no possibility to adapt an RDBMS for this purpose. However, with respect of CAP theorem, the missing of real consistency is a barrier for many applications…try to apply the statement eventually consistent to a deposit in your bank!