A thought on Hard vs Soft

Posted by Dru Sellers on February 6, 2011

Frozen Stream

With the move from RDBMS to NoSQL are we seeing the same shift that we saw when we moved from Hardware to Software. Are we seeing a shift from Harddata to Softdata?

Water is fluid, soft and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.

Lao-tzu

About Dru Sellers

Sr. Software Engineer at Dovetail Software.
This entry was posted in Small Ideas. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
  • http://twitter.com/doobiaus Craig D

    But you can’t build a house on quicksand.

  • http://redbeard0x0a.myopenid.com/ Bryan

    RDBMS will never go away, it definitely has its place and purpose. The recent trend to NoSQL is based on the fact that a RDBMS was always overkill for many of these web based applications. I personally think that MySQL was the ORIGINAL NoSQL (MyISAM) since it didn’t behave like a strict RDBMS. MySQL’s flexibility and performance is what made it so popular. We are just seeing people migrate to NoSQL because it makes sense for some of the workloads. I would be interested in somebody putting together a cost analysis of scaling out using a RDBMS vs. scaling out NoSQL. Oracle is expensive and so are good DBAs.

  • Anonymous

    What is the quicksand?

  • Anonymous

    I never said the Relational Datastore would go away. I merely posed the question are we seeing a move away from RDBMS towards less relational models in much the same way we moved from hardware to software? I agree on the overkill, and how far will it go? How often do you see hardware solutions for business problems any more?