All the cloud marketing is forcing a public review of all computing concepts... now it's time of... databases. SQL.

SQL language rules the current generation of databases. Since its birth (1970), it became the most widely used language for relational databases. We can fairly say SQL is well structured and with a solid foundation, very matured. Today, it's omnipresent. We are talking about MySQL, Oracle, SQLServer, etc. Everyone in the computing business has created at least some tables to model a system.

When I said SQL has a solid foundation, I mean the language is formally proved to be consistent (ACID properties), to guarantee transactions in order to preserve the information. The problem comes when we try to keep the consistency in a networked and distributed environment.

In a cloud fashion, there's a movement claiming for no more SQL, NoSQL. "NoSQL is a movement promoting a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases.". So we have to forget the nice SQL place, and begin to think about Blobs (big large binary objects), data distribution, clustering, and redundancy.

To name some actors, we have several categories: Wide Column Store / Column Families (e.g. Hadoop / HBase, Cassandra) Document Store (e.g. CouchDB, Jackrabbit) Key Value / Tuple Store (e.g. Amazon SimpleDB, Azure Table Storage) Eventually Consistent Key Value Store (e.g. Amazon Dynamo, Voldemort) Graph Databases (e.g. Neo4J) Object Databases (e.g. Objectivity, Gemstone) Grid Database Solutions (e.g. GigaSpaces) XML Databases (e.g. EMC Documentum xDB) other databases (e.g. IBM Lotus/Domino)

Hype comes from vendor-oriented technology, trying to standardize a solution (as open source project... or not). Also, we are talking about young technologies, being developed along versions (missing features or performance issues are frequent). At the beginning, most of them were developed for a specific internal need, and further developed.

In our company, OQUMA, we have successfully implemented Jackrabbit as our core document management technology. The experience was smooth, and it's works pretty fine. Also, (very important) there's a wide ecosystem of companies working with it (Day Software, Nuxeo, Hippo, JBoss GateIn + EXO, Drools Guvnor, etc)

To be fair, SQL is always to be between us, because it's proved to be solid and solves the most frequent scenario. So, now the misleading term "nosql" is translated by the community mostly to "not only sql".

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Following the excellent thread of articles from ArsTechnica, now they publish "Cloud platform choices: a developer's-eye view". In the overview, we can find the state of the art for a tech business development in the cloud. As bullet point we can have a tech business running on: A DIY model (buying servers, building a network, etc) Traditional hosting/dedicated services Cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (e.g. Amazon or Rackspace) Platform as a Service (PaaS) (e.g. Google's App Engine or Saleforce.com's Force.com)

To add a note to the original article, thinking to begin small, in an entrepreneur or SMB context:

A "DIY model" is out of the question, too expensive and complex. There's no way to leverage in time the initial costs. It's better to relay on someone.

"Traditional hosting/dedicated services". It's already commoditized. There's a lot of price choices, satisfied (or not) customers, opinions, etc. A whole market.

"IaaS" (Amazon or Rackspace)... Immature ... Only for experts / early adopters. My advice, begin small... E.g. dumping part of your web server static files... and evaluating the cost. The question is: Which is the benefit between a traditional dedicated server vs. a fully 24x7 deployed instance?

"PaaS"... If IaaS is immature, PaaS is only for hardcode innovators. There's no standard to compare implementations, no previous experience, and you are going be locked in with one vendor.

So, to be practical, go ahead with the traditional services, and keep an eye on the IaaS competitive new offering.

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http://wiki.oquma.net/index.php/Main_Page

This site is the main reference site for the OQUMA methodology. Here, we coordinate the system methodology for small and medium companies. The wiki is open and free. You can subscribe now. The methodology is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0. So you can apply it into your system, keeping a brief mention to us, as original creators. About our main commercial service (at http://www.oquma.com) is oriented to provide a SaaS document management service for standard compliance management. You can upload your documents (based on our templates), manage versions and approval workflows, publish final PDF documents, agendas, plans, and reports oriented to support the standard of choice.

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Just a quick note. United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 took place at a 0º location. A curious place to talk about climate change and global "warming"..... you know... It was snowing.

But when we talk about climate change, It's not only about "warming". Also, the climate change is about severe weather changes in the extremes.

A week after the conference, with a sense of irony, a freeeeezing storm is on the north hemisphere.

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