In recent years, the drumbeat of vendors proclaiming the ascendancy of NoSQL has become increasingly loud. One of the NoSQL vendors that is seeing business results from its NoSQL solution is 10gen, which is the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source MongoDB NoSQL database.
“We’re seeing the NoSQL space really taking off now and it’s being used in a significant way by a lot of people, including a lot of large enterprises,” Dwight Merriman, CEO and co-founder of 10gen, told InternetNews.com. “So big Internet companies like Craigslist and Shutterfly as well as big companies like SAP, Telefonica and LexisNexis are using it.”
Competition from the traditional database vendors also helps to validate the NoSQL space. At the OpenWorld Conference last month, Oracle announced its own NoSQL solution.
From a competitive perspective, Merriman sees MongoDB as the most popular NoSQL database in use today. His metrics for popular are somewhat indirect, though, and include MongoDB job postings and Google search popularity.
In terms of where NoSQL is fitting into enterprises, Merriman isn’t necessarily seeing NoSQL as a replacement for SQL databases but rather as a new tier of database technology usage. He noted that most Fortune 500 enterprises have an Oracle type relational database in their organizations already. The relational database is used for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP). Most big enterprises also have some form of data warehouse and a business reporting and intelligence database.