Trisha's Ramblings

Last Tuesday I went to a London Java Community talk which promised to debunk the hype around NoSQL.  Whether you're already bought into a NoSQL technology, or you're just wondering what all the noise is about, it's worth an hour out of your day to see Akmal Chaudhri's comprehensive summary of the technologies out there. Skillsmatter recorded the whole thing, as usual, so you can watch the presentation for yourself .  I promise neither I nor anyone else from 10gen paid him to mention MongoDB so much.

So, I've finished my first full week in the new job and I've learnt lots of new stuff. Which is great, because that's usually why you change jobs. I'm learning a lot about these new-fangled NoSQL database thingies. The LMAX architecture was based on keeping everything in memory and reducing the waits for IO - messages were journalled to disk, and reads and writes to the MySQL database were off the critical path. Therefore doing anything radical to the storage side of the architecture was just not high on the list of priorities. Everything I knew about NoSQL I learnt from the various conferences I've been going to in the last year, and even then that's limited - without a business reason to pursue knowledge I know it'll just leak out of my brain, so I avoid sessions with no immediate applicability to me. Let's summarise what I knew about NoSQL databases before last week: They don't use SQL. Who knew?  There are different flavour...