The emergence of web-scale apps has put us in the midst of a database crisis. Mobile apps, cloud-based SaaS/PaaS architectures and the distributed nature of the web have forced the software industry to make difficult compromises on how they collect, process and store data. While traditional databases provide the power and simplicity of SQL and the reliability of ACID, they don't scale without herculean-inspired workarounds. Newer, NoSQL solutions come close but don't quite make the last mile. They're designed to scale elastically, even on commodity hardware, but force developers to program powerful querying features into their application and throw away years of learning SQL skills, tools and languages. To give developers a truly modern solution for this century, we need to rethink how we process the collection and storage of data. It's time for a revolution.
Posted January 03, 2013