Matthew Kimber » Software http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:50:52 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 NoSQL http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/2010/02/05/nosql/ http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/2010/02/05/nosql/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:50:35 +0000 Matthew Kimber http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/?p=8 For whatever reason the term NoSQL flew under my radar until late January when I listened to the Hacker Medley podcast. Since then my eyes have been opened to just how popular this concept of structured storage is getting. The idea, as the name implies, is that SQL doesn’t have a place in this storage paradigm. This means the traditional way of thinking of persistence for our applications is shifted from tables, rows, and the schemas that define them to elements/objects and collections.

This method of persistence is gaining so much ground in computer science that many large and popular Internet sites use, and have been using for quite some time, a NoSQL solution. Take for instance BigTable from Google or Dynamo from Amazon.com the fact that either one of these giants is using NoSQL should give rise to your attention.

But, why?

Even though things seem to be popular one always has to ask, “Why should I invest the time to learn this stuff?” For me it is simple. Research into these topics is for my personal edification. I find it fun and exciting to learn these new things and the barrier to entry for NoSQL is really quite low. Just look at K. Scott Allen’s blog post on experimenting with MongoDB or Jason Alexander’s post to see just how easy it is to get started. When comparing the level of setup and difficulty of NHibernate with something like MongoDB it is clear that the path of least resistance is the latter.

This leads me to the point of answering the question, “Why use it in a project?” My answer is that it is just plain easy. Instead of trying to make the square peg (read: objects) fit in the round hole (read: relational databases) we are storing a near one-to-one object within the database. Granted I have yet to use one of these NoSQL implementations in my own projects, but plan to do so in the near future.

Conclusion

As a result of my piqued interest in this newfound topic, I plan on periodically posting about my research and experiences. The first database I will experiment with is MongoDB so stay tuned. For the meanwhile, check out the following resources:

]]> http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/2010/02/05/nosql/feed/ 3 The CS Classics http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/2010/02/05/the-cs-classics/ http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/2010/02/05/the-cs-classics/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:45:32 +0000 Matthew Kimber http://www.matthewkimber.com/blog/?p=31 After years of wanting these books I finally have them in my possession. You are right, they aren’t rare and they aren’t really that expensive, they have simply been put on the back burner over and over.

CS Classic Texts

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