Stumped why folks are turning to NoSQL

Joe Stump, CTO and founder of SimpleGEO, offers us a different perspective of why organizations such as his are using NoSQL. Most debates center on technical concerns such as scalability or performance requirements. However, in his post Joe focuses on a different side of the debate, operations. Joe does not debate that it's possible to get traditional RDBMS systems to perform at the same rate as NoSQL data stores, But rather points out the lengths in terms of manpower and cost that is required to do so. I think the questions that Joe asks in his post are just as interesting as the answers to those questions.

• Do you honestly think that the PhDs at Google, Amazon, Twitter, Digg, and Facebook created Cassandra, BigTable, Dynamo, etc. when they could have just used a RDBMS instead?
• How much are you spending on those MS SQL servers with SSD drives that serve up 6,100 results a second?
• How much time are your DBAs spending administering your RDBMSs?
• How much time are they in the data centers?
• How much do those data centers cost?
• How much do DBAs cost a year?
• How easy is it to add a new server to your cluster?

Ultimately, Joe sums up his reasons to use NoSQL with the following quote:

I guess what I’m saying is that my decision to use NoSQL, and I’m guessing others’ decisions to do so, has less to do with the fact that we can’t squeeze a few thousand writes a second out of MySQL and more to do with management and cost overhead. NoSQL solutions allow us to serve absurd amounts of data for a really, really low price.

Read more: NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin!

8,000,000 operations per second

That is the level of performance that Eliot Horowitz has reached with MongoDB. The following are the slides from his presentation on sharding and a link to the video of the presentation as well.