It Must be Crap on Relational Dabases Week 
Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 3:28AM
Todd Hoff

It's hard to be a relational database lately. After years of faithful service everywhere you look the world is turning against you:

  • Recently at the NoSQL conference 150 revolutionaries met with their new anti-RDBMS arms suppliers. And you know what happens when revolutionaries are motivated, educated, funded, and well armed.
  • The revolution has gone mainstream when Computerworld writes No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam. It's not just whispers anymore, it's everywhere.
  • And perennial revolutionary Michael Stonebraker runs from blog to blog shouting the The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us). Relational vendors are selling legacy software, are 50x slower than other alternatives, and that can not stand.
  • The Greek Chorus on Hacker News sings of anger and lies.

    Certainly some say stick with the past. It's your fault, you aren't doing it right, give us another chance and all will be as it ever was. Some smirk saying this is nothing but a return to a more ancient time when IBM was King.

    But it's in the air. It's in the code. A revolution is coming. To what? That is what is not yet clear.

    See also:
  • NoSQL? by Curt Monash.
  • CouchDB says BigTable clones are too complex.
  • Yahoo! Developer Network Blog. Very nice summary of the different talks.
    • Article originally appeared on (http://highscalability.com/).
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