No SQL Taxonomy

In the last year or so there has been an incredible explosion of interest in the concept of No SQL. There are so many varying implementations that differ so wildly that it is often difficult to get a clear picture of what is what. Typically authors will either be intimately involved with one specific project or will give cursory overviews of a number of projects.

What is needed is some basic categorization and classification – in other words a taxonomy of the No SQL provider space. For example, what are the key criteria  used to classify implementations? There are disjoint subsets in the No SQL space, and comparison can be only made between subsets or between  implementations within a given subset. Its all about apple-to-apple comparison.

Here are a few links to shed light on the topic:

• The Common Principles Behind the NOSQL Alternatives – Nati Shalon – Dec. 2009
• NoSQL Ecosystem – Ellis Blog
• Visual Guide To NoSQL Systems – Hurst blog – March 2010
• No SQL Debrief -a “random” discussion by some key contributors – June 2009
• myNoSQL – Has a very good nav bar with a basic classification of:
  • Colum Stores
  • Document Stores
  • Key-Value Stores
  • Graph Databases

And of course let us not forget the contrarian view:

• Brian Aker’s Hilarious NoSQL Stand Up Routine – Brian Aker – funny anti-NoSQL video – HighScalability – Nov. 2009
• Why you dont want to shard – Mysql performance blog – Aug. 2009
• Errors in Database Systems, Eventual Consistency, and the CAP Theorem – Stonebraker – CACM – April 2010
• Dynamo – a flawed architecture – sarma – Nov. 2009 – Followup and re-rebuttals
• The dark side of NoSQL – CodeMonkey – Sep. 2009 – slides
• Dynamo – “Flawed Architecture”
  • Dynamo: A flawed architecture – Part I – jsensarma – Nov. 2009
  • followup – Twitter
  • Thoughts on Dynamos flawed architecture – Nov. 2009

Further thoughts on Dynamos flawed architecture – dizzy blog – Nov. 2009

Further thoughts on Dynamos flawed architecture – dizzy blog – Nov. 2009