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Comment by vicaya | Hacker News Reader

NoSQL is trading off ACID transactions for scalability/throughput/latency. Both Calvin and Omid can add ACID transactions to any NoSQL for about nx decrease in throughput.

NoSQL is about choice. Period.

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Yes, and fragmentation of your data. Resulting in e.g. data quality problems. It's not just choice, it's choice with downsides that many seem to not really care about at all.

That is simply untrue. You can have fragmentation of your data with SQL databases as well.

NoSQL is giving up FAR more than ACID. It is giving up the ability to consume the stored data in a beautifully concise and expressive manner.

edit: 'the ability to'

If my data is document based then how is SQL going to be more concise and expressive than JSON ?

Say I have a domain model that involves a primary object e.g. User with lots of maps and arrays then how is SQL going to be better then ? Lots of tables and joins better than a single document. I think not.

If your data is a User object with maps and arrays, and you design a data structure which gets you the result in exactly that format, you _are_ giving up the ability to ask other questions of this data. You are giving up the ability to ask _many_ different kinds of questions (expressive) in a relatively simple way (concise).

The consensus of NoSQL these days is Not only SQL. Nobody is disagreeing that SQL (and the underlying relational algebra) is expressive and general.

For a lot applications/use cases, schema free get/put/delete is a lot more concise than any SQL concoctions. Besides, using RDBMS/SQL to store/retrieve complex graph is neither beautiful or concise.

Just because you can use your Swiss army knife to kill a few roaches doesn't mean you should.

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