Paul Krill
Editor at Large

MongoDB co-author: Enterprises to start adding NoSQL

news
Aug 24, 20112 mins

Nonrelational systems will work alongside OLTP and business intelligence databases, according to Dwight Merriman

Alreading serving enterprise needs for OLTP/operational and business intelligence and reporting systems, the database space is expanding to a third critical realm, nonrelational, NoSQL database usage, MongoDB co-author Dwight Merriman said on Wednesday.

“If we project forward a little bit in time, all enterprises will have tools in these three buckets,” Merriman said at the NoSQL Now conference in San Jose, Calif. He is CEO and co-founder of 10gen, which develops and supports MongoDB, an open source, nonrelational database in the NoSQL vein. Enterprise needs are expanding beyond what OLTP and business intelligence systems can accommodate, Merriman explained. “We need something, though, for some of these scale problems and you can’t solve them with the existing architectures. We’d also like something that better fits writing code today,” with object orientation and agile development methodologies becoming more prominent, said Merriman.

The nonrelational NoSQL bucket meets the need for a backing store for Web application servers, content management systems, structured event logging, server-side storage for mobile applications, and document storage, Merriman said. NoSQL databases do online data processing and storage and manipulation but do not support complex, transactional semantics, such as what an Oracle database does. NoSQL is defined at the nosql-database.org website as next-generation databases that are nonrelational, horizontally scalable, distributed, and open source. They were originally intended to serve as modern Web-scale databases.

MongoDB was first published in 2009 and has users including Craigslist, Shutterfly, and Foursquare, according to 10gen.

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Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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