Database Reference
In-Depth Information
These advantages have given NoSQL systems a lot of attractions. However, there
are many obstacles that still need to be overcome before theses systems can appeal
to mainstream enterprises such as
3
:
Programming Model
: NoSQL databases offer few facilities for ad-hoc query
and analysis. Even a simple query requires significant programming expertise.
Missing the support of declaratively expressing the important join operation has
been always considered one of the main limitations of these systems.
Transaction Support
: Transaction management is one of the powerful features
of RDBMS. The current limited support (if any) of the transaction notion from
NoSQL database systems is considered as a big obstacle towards their acceptance
in implementing mission critical systems.
Maturity
: RDBMS systems are well-know with their high stability and rich
functionalities. In comparison, most NoSQL alternatives are in pre-production
versions with many key features either being not stable enough or yet to be
implemented. Therefore, enterprises are still approaching this new wave with
extreme caution.
Support
: Enterprises look for the assurance that if a the system fails, they will
be able to get timely and competent support. All RDBMS vendors go to great
lengths to provide a high level of enterprise support. In contrast, most NoSQL
systems are open source projects. Although there are few firms offering support
for each NoSQL database, these companies often are small start-ups without the
global reach, support resources, or credibility of the key market players such as
Oracle, Microsoft or IBM.
Expertise
: There are millions of developers throughout the world, and in every
business segment, who are familiar with RDBMS concepts and programming.
In contrast, almost every NoSQL developer is in a learning mode. This situation
will be addressed naturally over time. However, currently, it is far easier to find
experienced RDBMS programmers or administrators than a NoSQL expert.
Currently, there is a big debate between the NoSQL and RDBMS campuses
which is centered around the right choice for implementing online transaction
processing systems. RDBMS proponents think that the NoSQL camp has not spent
sufficient time to understand the theoretical foundation of the transaction processing
model. For example, the eventual consistency model is still not well-defined and
different implementations may differs significantly with each other. This means
figuring out all these inconsistent behavior lands on the application developer's
responsibilities and make their life very much harder. On the other side, the NoSQL
camp argues that this is actually a benefit because it gives the domain-specific
optimization opportunities back to the application developers who now is no longer
constrained by a one-size-fits-all model. However, they admit that making such
optimization decision requires a lot of experience and can be very error-prone and
dangerous if the decisions are not made by experts.
