NoSQL Has a Weakness. Just Tell No One.

July 2, 2014

I read “The Rise (and Fall?) of NoSQL.” The write up seems to take a stance somewhat different from that adopted by enterprise search vendors. With search getting more difficult to sell for big bucks, findability folks are reinventing themselves as Big Data mavens. Examples range from the Fast Search clones to tagging outfits. (Sorry, no names this morning. Search and content processing vendors with chunks of venture firm cash do not need any more fireworks today.)

Is Big Data the white knight that will allow those venture funded companies to deliver a huge payday? I don’t know, but I keep my nest egg is less risky

Here’s the segment I noted:

It’s quite simple: analytics tooling for NoSQL databases is almost non-existent. Apps stuff a lot of data into these databases, but legacy analytics tooling based on relational technology can’t make any sense of it (because it’s not uniform, tabular data). So what usually happens is that companies extract, transform, normalize, and flatten their NoSQL data into an RDBMS, where they can slice and dice data and build reports. The cost and pain of this process, together with the fact that NoSQL databases aren’t fully self-contained (using them requires using their “competition”” for analytics!) is the biggest threat to the possible dominance of NoSQL databases.

My take on this searchification of Big Data boils down to one word: Scrambling for revenues. Perhaps some of the money pumped into crazy marketing schemes might be directed at creating something that works. Systems that dip into a barrel of trail mix return a snack that cannot replace a square meal.

Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2014

Comments

Comments are closed.

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Meta