It's good to see a voice of reason. I think we all win if NoSQL is allowed to survive. Having multiple paths to modeling and designing our applications is an enrichment of our ability to create interesting and valuable applications in our industry. The last 10 years have been about living under the modeling constraints of RDBMS's and the industry is slowly waking up to the realization that it does not need to be like this. Now we got choices. Graph db's, column db's, document db's etc.
I would like to thank you for the great job you have and are doing on Redis. It's an awesome piece of technology and warms my heart as an European :). Are you based in Palermo ?
"Allowed to survive" is the wrong approach. "Finds a niche" is better.
The fact that software engineers need to understand is that NoSQL is in no way a replacement for SQL in areas of data with inherent structure. In such areas, the relational model wins hands-down, and NoSQL is a big, heavy foot-gun. The caliber of the foot gun goes up significantly when multiple applications need to access the same data.
On the other hand, the relational model breaks down in some ways in many areas. Some things that you'd think are inherently structured (like world-wide street addresses) turn out to only be semi-structured. Document management, highly performing hierarchical directory stores, and a few other areas also are bad matches for the relational model. Other stores work well in many of these areas, from the filesystem to things like NoSQL databases.
The big problem occurs when semi-structured data (say files which contain printed invoice data in PDF format) have to be linked to inherently structured data (say, vendor invoices). In these cases, tradeoffs have to be made......
I have no doubt that NoSQL is able to find a niche. I doubt it will be one which at best involves inherently structured data.
> I think we all win if NoSQL is allowed to survive.
What does that even mean? Is it some sort of cultural practice or religion we are afraid of losing. So we should look over lost data and bad designs just because something falls under the "NoSQL" category?
I think anyone married to a technology like it is a religion is poised for failure. Technology should be evaluated as a tool. "Is this tool useful to me for this job?" Yes/No? Not "it has NoSQL in its title, it must be good, I'll use that".
I would like to thank you for the great job you have and are doing on Redis. It's an awesome piece of technology and warms my heart as an European :). Are you based in Palermo ?