Friday, July 15, 2011

Database high priest mud-wrestles Facebook • The Register

Excerpt from a lively NoSQL/NewSQL/etc. debate.  I’m getting a strong sense of déjà vu, relative to the ill-fated “object database” debates of the late 1980s.

The extra twist of the knife is that Stonebraker has little respect for Cassandra or HBase either. VoltDB provides the speed of Cassandra and HBase and other NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, he says, but it retains the relational model. It doesn't limit your transactional semantics. He calls this NewSQL, in clear response to the NoSQL movement.

"At least for new OLTP applications, giving up ACID and giving up SQL is a terrible idea. You don't have to give up either of those. You can go fast without giving up either. If you give up ACID, you end up pushing data consistency into the application logic and that's just way harder to do," Stonebraker tells us.

"We've benchmarked ourselves against Cassandra on TPC-C, and we're a factor of five faster...the difference between NoSQL and NewSQL performance is a very big number."

Database high priest mud-wrestles Facebook • The Register

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