In this article, see how Dynamo accelerated the NoSQL revolution that is driving the database industry and much more.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Dynamo accelerated the NoSQL revolution that’s driving the database industry. Recently, Amazon announced PartiQL — A SQL-Compatible Query Language for their flagship NoSQL database Amazon DynamoDB. This has brought the NoSQL “re:evolution” full circle. It’s wonderful to see the collaborative research from UCSD and Couchbase enabling the industry to move forward. NoSQL had a good run. MapReduce triggered it in 2004. Dynamo and BigTable accelerated it in 2007. NoSQL meant no support for SQL, no support for multi-document transactions, no schema management, no procedural language, and many more No’s. However, NoSQL wasn’t a rebel without a cause. It promised reliability, scalability, and flexibility. Someone quipped: “If you are not ready to scale, you’re not ready to succeed!”. To the amusement of SQL folks, MongoDB claimed it’s webscale. Despite the reservations and opposition from the database community, the NoSQL movement marched on. Many wondered if it’s useful for Amazon, Google, and Facebook, who else would find it useful? Here we are. With more than 200 NoSQL databases. NoSQL systems haven’t remained simple key-value stores with get/set, map/reduce operations. MongoDB added an aggregation framework, a modern storage engine, and dropped ACID. DynamoDB added transactions, indexes, and now a SQL-like language. Cassandra started with CQL, an SQL-like language, made significant changes with 3.0, and has been adding new datatypes, DDLs and DMLs. Couchbase started with simple APIs, added views. In 2015, Couchbase introduced N1QL — SQL for JSON, global secondary indexes, and later added analytical service with N1QL support, and distributed transactions. If you’re read The Innovator’s Dilemma, it should remind you of the Toyota and the mini mills stories.
