Coming Soon: The NoSQL Series

We're always excited about new trends here at Viget, and the most recent phenomenon that's caught our attention is NoSQL - the reaction against traditional relational databases like MySQL. The movement has been characterized by an explosion of interest in key-value stores, document-oriented databases, and other (mostly non-relational) alternatives for data storage. Several of the developers here in the Labs have been experimenting with these emerging systems, and over the next few weeks, we'll be posting our thoughts.

We'll show examples of situations in which, say, MongoDB works particularly well - and we'll also show situations in which you're much better off staying with something more traditional. In fact, that's the conclusion we've drawn from the whole thing: just as many different programming languages can coexist, with each being useful for some particular set of problems, many different databases can coexist - with each being useful for some particular set of domains. Even more interesting to me, though, is the set of complex domains that can be best served with multiple database systems... Hey, if Twitter can rely on Scala and Ruby, why can't we build an application with MySQL on top of CouchDB?

In the course of this series, we'd love to hear your feedback - how are you using these alternatives to traditional databases? Have you abandoned Postgres to Tokyo Cabinet, or tested with Neo4j? How are they working for you?

Look for the first post in the series next week!