Gartner Hype Cycle graphic cited by Sicular

Lots of year-in-review pieces on BD have shown a skeptical cautiousness, recently. Gartner’s Svetlana Sicular wonders where on the downward slope (see graphic above) BD’s outlook is presently situated, and reveals that many among her NoSQL clientele have exited their honeymoon periods with the promising technology, and are coming up against the real-world difficulties of framing and then analytically investigating the right meaningful questions with their data treasure chests.

“You can fool yourself with data like you can’t with anything else. I fear a Big Data bubble.”
                         ~Claudia Perlich

But there are also questions on the suitability front. In ReadWriteWeb’s interview with Monte Widenius, the original creator of MySQL, the story of Twitter’s failed attempt to replace it’s MySQL backend with Cassandra is recounted. According to Widenius, development staffs like to jump into NoSQL because little upfront designing is required. It has more of a proptyping feel; there’s the belief things can be resolved on the fly. He contends that as soon as the barrier is passed where data no longer fits into memory, SQL databases begin to out-perform NoSQL. His new open source project, MariaDB, is looking to bridge the gap between the two realms and support features common to both.

“SQL is not going away. NoSQL can’t replace it. Almost everyone will need relations (i.e., joins) to utilize their data. Still, there are places where NoSQL makes sense. I think, in the future, you will see more combined SQL and NoSQL usage.”
                         ~Monte Widenius

~RS