Traditional relational databases aren’t going away anytime soon, but proponents of a new approach gathered in Boston this week for the NoSQL Live conference. DatabaseJournal has the report on this new open source approach that’s already been embraced by some of the biggest players on the Web, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
For most of the Web era, Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) based on SQL have dominated the database landscape. But over the course of the last year, a new approach has begun to take hold known as NoSQL, offering an alternative to the traditional RDBMS.
This week at the NoSQL Live conference in Boston, multiple open source projects and the vendors that back them will talk about the merits and limitations of the new approach. While projects like CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra and Valdemort are in use by some of the biggest names in the Web, including Twitter, Sourceforge, Facebook and LinkedIn, the NoSQL approach might not be for everyone, though it will make sense for a certain class of development.
“The NoSQL movement has recognized that a new class of applications doesn’t need all the heavyweight rigid structure that comes along with a SQL RDBMS,” Cloudant CEO Alan Hoffman told InternetNews.com. “There are a new class of problems that can be solved with different types of database solutions that in some cases require more flexible data storage systems.”
Cloudant provides commercial services for the open source Apache CouchDB NoSQL database.
As opposed to an RDBMS, which uses a relational model to link data, the NoSQL approach takes a different tack.
