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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

> NoSQL data stores in their various incarnations apparently have equalled or slightly surpassed RDBMS as of 2014-2015

Wait, what is this based on? Hacker News postings? There is no way that NoSQL has surpassed RDBMS even among startups.

It would be interesting to know how much data Google stores in traditional RDBMS versus NoSQL stores (BigTable, Spanner[0], etc.). I could probably track down this number, but then I expect I wouldn't be able to talk about it after, so for now I'm saying ignorance is bliss :). I would wager that we're rather more NoSQL heavy than most organizations, so it wouldn't really be a good proxy for the industry in general, but it might be helpful for justifying Steve's claim. It might be particularly helpful if we looked at the workloads Google runs on NoSQL stores that traditionally would have mandated an RDBMS.

[0]: http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

Google actually built a RDBMS on top of Spanner: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html

Indeed! However, many uses of Spanner are what I would call native. It should be possible to separate out the two.

In terms of data volume, the Google Search store alone might move the scale substantially.

I'd probably measure by how much programmer time is spent working in each kind of DB.

You're probably thinking about this as "instances of NoSQL services replacing RDBMS installations" but that's putting the playing field in the wrong place. Look at it as a venn diagram. There are 3 important zones: the zone where RDBMS excels; the zone where RDBMS and NoSQL compete and one or the other may be preferable depending on circumstances; and the zone where RDBMS never makes sense. You're looking at the field as the first two zones, Yegge is looking at all three zones.

Which means that you're missing things like caching engines, such as memcached, and other services which are not replacing an RDBMS but filling a different niche, which are widely deployed in industry.

Even traditional RDBMS software is building in noSQL functionality - many people simply use postgres as a key-value store.

What's funny is that it performs better than many "pure" NoSql alternatives. I remember an issue on github, where the poster said they replaced mongodb with postgres and increased performance by an order of magnitude or something like that.

In case anyone is still reading this and is interested: http://www.enterprisedb.com/postgres-plus-edb-blog/marc-lins... shows that as well.

I think it's more that they're considered and deployed at the same scale as RDBMS--obviously oracle still has a pretty strong hold on the database world: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

One thing that ranking does not quite take into account is SQLite on Android and iPhone. That's got to count for something, as that's a pretty massive deployment.

sqlite, per itself, isn't a RDBMS replacement, it's a fopen() replacement.

The reasoning in the original prediction was that O/R mapping sucks though, which is something you gotta do in sqlite. So according to that it should still count against the prediction.

SQLite is an "SQL database engine", so, no, definitely not a RDBMS replacement.

According that stat counting the top 10, NoSQL databases account for 12% popularity. Given that this is talking about website mentions, job offers, twitter mentions and not actual installs that number isn't indicative of much success. 10% is actually pretty impressive but not equalled or slightly surpassed.

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