Chapter 1. Why NoSQL?

For almost as long as we’ve been in the software profession, relational databases have been the default choice for serious data storage, especially in the world of enterprise applications. If you’re an architect starting a new project, your only choice is likely to be which relational database to use. (And often not even that, if your company has a dominant vendor.) There have been times when a database technology threatened to take a piece of the action, such as object databases in the 1990’s, but these alternatives never got anywhere.

After such a long period of dominance, the current excitement about NoSQL databases comes as a surprise. In this chapter we’ll explore why relational databases became so dominant, and why ...

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