Modern NoSQL 101: Prologue to this Blog

I was reading several Gartner reports the other day and the question came to my mind:

How and why do people perceive database technology in a certain way?

It also reminded me of the talk by Jens Dittrich (the NoSQL Parody — watch it. I highly recommend it). Below is roughly the landscape that Gartner has came up with (note: this is my very idiosyncratic interpretation)

(*some of the content in this post was adopted from Jens Dittrich’s talk “No!No! and No! (=NoSQL Parody)”)

And if you map database technologies into such a framework, the common perception today is roughly as follows:

Being a classically trained database person myself, my immediate reaction was

“Houston, we have a problem!”

And it’s not so much that we have a problem with our technology. It is that we have a problem with how we sell our technology out to the world.

A while ago I’ve discovered that when a product or a service is not doing as well as you would like it to, you have to ask 2 simple questions:

(1) Is there something fundamentally wrong with the product itself? (feature disparity, bugs, wrong architecture or poor customer SLAs). If there is, then you “go to engineering” and ask them to fix it.

(2) Is there something fundamentally wrong with the perception of the product? If there is, then you “go to marketing” and ask them to fix it.

Above is an overly simplified view, but the key takeaway here is that if the value is not communicated very clearly, simply and accurately, then no matter what an engineer does or builds, the perception will cloud the “reality”.

So what is today’s perception NoSQL?

It could be depicted like this:

NoSQL folks think of SQL alone as something not cool. SQL means “No Cool”. So No(NoCool) translates to “Cool”!

Is this a mass hypnosis?

How do you fix this?

You go Deep! Deep! and Deeper!

And you try to understand NoSQL technology very intimately: (1) what it is, (2) why it exists, (3) how it is built, and (4) why should the rest of the world care about it. You assess the current landscape with support of both quantitative and qualitative data. This is what this blog is all about...

The blog will focus on our NoSQL solution in Azure (Microsoft’s cloud), namely Azure DocumentDB. Yes, partly because I work for Microsoft (that’s a full disclosure), but more importantly, because Azure DocumentDB is truly technically excellent product that brings a lot of value. The modern NoSQL space is crowded. The common perception about DocumentDB is not quite there, but this is what I and many others on this blog will attempt to change here.

Please leave you comments, questions, tweet about it, share it in social networks. We will try to address them all. This will be a technical blog, but we promise to sprinkle it with a lot of fun and insightful things.

Happy Reading!

-Rimma