Explaining SQL and NoSQL, to Grandma

One of the most essential choices a developer must make is about what database technology to use. For many years, the options were limited to different flavors of relational databases that supported Structured Query Language (SQL). These include MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DB2, to name a few.

Over the last 15 years, many new databases have come to the market as part of the No-SQL movement. These include key-value stores such as Redis and Amazon DynamoDB, wide-column stores such as Cassandra and HBase, document stores such as MongoDB and Couchbase, and graph databases and search engines such as Elasticsearch and Solr.

In this article, we’re focused on gaining a high-level understanding of SQL and NoSQL, without peeling back the features of any of the different vendor offerings.

Also, we’re actually going to try having fun doing it.

Explaining SQL to Grandma

Grandma, imagine that I wasn’t your only grandchild. Instead, Mom and Dad loved each other like rabbits and had 100-kids and then adopted 50 more. Also, it’s probably a good idea to even imagine that protective-child-services was not a thing.

Now, you love all of us and would never, ever want to forget any of our names, birthdays, favorite ice cream flavor, clothing…