![](https://csdnimg.cn/release/download_crawler_static/3643462/bg14.jpg)
2. The NoSQL-Movement | 16
“Every new technology begins with naïve euphoria – its inventor(s) are usually submersed in the
ideas themselves; it is their immediate colleagues that experience most of the wild enthusiasm.
Most technologies are overpromised, more often than not simply to generate funds to continue
the work, for funding is an integral part of scientific development; without it, only the most
imaginative and revolutionary ideas make it beyond the embryonic stage. Hype is a natural
handmaiden to overpromise, and most technologies build rapidly to a peak of hype. Following
this, there is almost always an overreaction to ideas that are not fully developed, and this
inevitably leads to a crash of sorts, followed by a period of wallowing in the depths of cynicism.
Many new technologies evolve to this point, and then fade away. The ones that survive do so
because someone finds a good use (= true user benefit) for the basic ideas.” (cf. [Bez93] cited
in [For10])
The participants of the NoSQL meet-up in San Francisco gave pragmatic advice for such remarks: com-
panies do not miss anything if they do not switch to NoSQL databases and if a relational DBMS does
its job, there is no reason to replace it. Even the organizer of the meet-up, Johan Oskarsson of Last.fm,
admitted that Last.fm did not yet use a NoSQL database in production as of June 2009. He furthermore
states that NoSQL databases “aren’t relevant right now to mainstream enterprises, but that might change
one to two years down the line” (Johan Oskarsson, Last.fm, cf. [Com09a]). Nonetheless, the participants
of the NoSQL meet-up suggest to take a look at NoSQL alternatives if it is possible and it makes sense
(e. g. in the development of new software) (cf. [Com09a]). Blogger Dennis Forbes does not see any ov-
erenthusiasm among the inventors and developers of non-relational datastores (“most of them are quite
brilliant, pragmatic devs”) but rather among developers using these technologies and hoping that “this
movement invalidates their weaknesses”. He—coming from traditional relational database development
for the financial, insurance, telecommunication and power generation industry—however states that “there
is indisputably a lot of fantastic work happening among the NoSQL camp, with a very strong focus on
scalability”. On the other hand, he criticizes in a postnote to his blog post that “the discussion is, by nature
of the venue, hijacked by people building or hoping to build very large scale web properties (all hoping to be
the next Facebook), and the values and judgments of that arena are then cast across the entire database
industry—which comprises a set of solutions that absolutely dwarf the edge cases of social media—which
is really...extraordinary” (cf. [For10]).
2.2.3. NoSQL as Being Nothing New
Similar to the hype argument are common remarks by NoSQL critics that NoSQL databases are nothing
new since other attempts like object databases have been around for decades. As an example for this
argument blogger David Intersimone mentions Lotus Notes which can be subsumed as an early document
store supporting distribution and replication while favoring performance over concurrency control (unless
otherwise indicated, [Int10]). This example is especially interesting as the main developer of CouchDB,
Damien Katz, worked for Lotus Notes for several years. NoSQL advocates comment that CouchDB is ’Notes
done right’ as Notes’ distribution features were not aware of current web technologies and the software
also got bloated with business relevant features instead of beeing just a slim datastore ([PLL09]).
Examples like Lotus Notes, business analytic or stream processing oriented datastores show that these
alternatives to relational databases have existed for a long time and blogger Dennis Forbes criticizes therefore
that the “one size fitting it all” argument is nothing more but a strawman since few people ever held “Rdbms’
as the only tool for all of your structured and unstructured data storage needs” (cf. [For10]).