The NoSQL community needs to engage the DBA’s

[Tony Bain]

The NoSQL movement has been gaining some steam lately, with discussion forums and mailing lists popping up all around the web.* Despite having a career that has been centered on the RDBMS, I have made no secret that I think we have gone too far down with our RDBMS for everything mindset.* I think we need to add a few more tools back into our data toolbox.*

Today, 99.5% of new data centric developments started will use a RDBMS by default.* Maybe .5 of a % will consider using something as obtuse as a NoSQL platform.* By experience I know the majority of people discussing NoSQL platforms today are web developers.* In fact there is almost a sense of trying to trying to keep this under the radar of DBAs.* If we don’t talk to the DBAs about this stuff then they won’t bother us with all that jabber about consistency, data integrity, robustness and recovery.*

Actually, many of the NoSQL projects are touting one of the key benefits of a NoSQL platform is you can do big data without the need of a costly DBA.

Baloney.

This shows me that the people making those comments have no idea what DBAs do and what happens with critical data applications post deployment.

A NoSQL data platform may have a different approach to operational management than a RDBMS, but a large part of the requirement will be the same.* It doesn’t matter if you have 10, 100 or 1000GB of data deployed on a NoSQL platform or an RDBMS.* Someone still needs to be thinking about backups & recovery, availability, capacity planning, performance monitoring, import/export, data integration, tuning & optimization, replication latency and so on.* Also, I have never come across any technology that works perfectly 100% of the time, so when things don’t work as expected and nodes are out of sync or partial data corruption occurs at 2am, someone will still need to fix it.* Guess who that is going to be.

DBAs are critical to any wide scale success with NoSQL platforms.* They need to be engaged and educated.* Sure they are going to be really annoying for quite a while, ripping into common NoSQL limitations such as lack of transaction support, eventual consistency, data duplication & application controlled data integrity.* However over time they will start to see the positive aspects as well and learn sometimes a mallet isn’t the only tool required.







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