Re:NoSQL No More
by spamizbad on Friday April 11, 2014 @01:43PM
(#7574313)
There's a sizable contingent (but still a tiny minority) of developers who will outright dismiss anything SQL and typically view databases as these things you kinda pick on a whim based on whatever is easiest to shoehorn your MVP into. Fancy things like a powerful query language, robust data types, transactions, ACID-compliance etc? YAGNI.
Although I don't share this view, I cant say its always wrong. If you're building simple MVPs to find product-market fit for ideas why bother? If there's a 90% chance what you're building will never evolve to need those features, why invest in them?
But if your "product" ends up being a 10% survivor you better have a plan to move to something more powerful before you compound too much technical debt from your NoSQL database. Once you start scaling your business and have to face competition, NoSQL becomes productivity tarpit. Queries that take 20 minutes to write and optimize in the SQL realm can turn into day-long exercises in NoSQL.
The reality is most developers aren't cranking out disposable software used to test the market for new ideas. We're working on things that already have a place, we just need to make them better. For us, the best option right now is SQL + maybe some specialized databases for certain purposes (Columnar for analytics, graph for relationship analysis, full-text for text, etc)
Although I don't share this view, I cant say its always wrong. If you're building simple MVPs to find product-market fit for ideas why bother? If there's a 90% chance what you're building will never evolve to need those features, why invest in them?
But if your "product" ends up being a 10% survivor you better have a plan to move to something more powerful before you compound too much technical debt from your NoSQL database. Once you start scaling your business and have to face competition, NoSQL becomes productivity tarpit. Queries that take 20 minutes to write and optimize in the SQL realm can turn into day-long exercises in NoSQL.
The reality is most developers aren't cranking out disposable software used to test the market for new ideas. We're working on things that already have a place, we just need to make them better. For us, the best option right now is SQL + maybe some specialized databases for certain purposes (Columnar for analytics, graph for relationship analysis, full-text for text, etc)