Regaring NOSQL - Alternatives to RDBMS

Question

Hi Guys,

I have been stumbled on things like RDBMS alternatives very often now a days... And i am following some of the open source implementation..

wat i understaing is, its best suited for the web apps in large scale (like google & amazon).. they mainly concentrated on very large distributed data stores..

how this could help small start ups looking for a existing costly alternative data stores.. and is this really yield both performance & maintanance gain for small applications?

I just started this discussion and belive somebody here already got same frustration trying these new approaches earlier and may gain experience in it.. this may help start ups like us..

Cheers

Ramesh vel

Answer 1

It all depends on your scaling requirments. RBDMS require locks to work and so can only really be scaled "up". NoSQL-style DBs such as Googles bigtable and CouchDB are massively scalable and very cheap, but can get very complicated to write an app on top of as developers have to deal with all kinds of data consistency/fault tolerance issues in thier application layer.

I would say for a small application you're probably better off with a SQL-based relational database. Whilst in theory much more expensive, being realistic at a small scale that price trades off as a much simpler system to work with.

If however you're start up is a muti-tenant solution which needs to deal with a lot of writes, I'd look carefully at alternatives.