Eric Redmond - Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement

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Riding up the Beaver Run SuperChair in Breckenridge, Colorado, we wondered where the fresh powder was. Breckenridge made snow, and the slopes were immaculately groomed, but there was an inevitable sameness to the conditions on the mountain. Without fresh snow, the total experience was lacking.

In 1994, as an employee of IBMs database development lab in Austin, I had very much the same feeling. I had studied object-oriented databases at the University of Texas at Austin because after a decade of relational dominance, I thought that object-oriented databases had a real chance to take root. Still, the next decade brought more of the same relational models as before. I watched dejectedly as Oracle, IBM, and later the open source solutions led by MySQL spread their branches wide, completely blocking out the sun for any sprouting solutions on the fertile floor below.

Over time, the user interfaces changed from green screens to client-server to Internet-based applications, but the coding of the relational layer stretched out to a relentless barrage of sameness, spanning decades of perfectly competent tedium. So, we waited for the fresh blanket of snow.

And then the fresh powder finally came. At first, the dusting wasnt even enough to cover this mornings earliest tracks, but the power of the storm took over, replenishing the landscape and delivering the perfect skiing experience with the diversity and quality that we craved. Just this past year, I woke up to the realization that the database world, too, is covered with a fresh blanket of snow. Sure, the relational databases are there, and you can get a surprisingly rich experience with open source RDBMS software. You can do clustering, full-text search, and even fuzzy searching. But youre no longer limited to that approach. I have not built a fully relational solution in a year. Over that time, Ive used a document-based database and a couple of key-value datastores.

The truth is that relational databases no longer have a monopoly on flexibility or even scalability. For the kinds of applications that we build, there are more appropriate models that are simpler, faster, and more reliable. As a person who spent ten years at IBM Austin working on databases with our labs and customers, this development is simply stunning to me. In Seven Databases in Seven Weeks , youll work through examples that cover a beautiful cross section of the most critical advances in the databases that back Internet development. Within key-value stores, youll learn about the radically scalable and reliable Riak and the beautiful query mechanisms in Redis. From the columnar database community, youll sample the power of HBase, a close cousin of the relational database models. And from the document-oriented database stores, youll see the elegant solutions for deeply nested documents in the wildly scalable MongoDB. Youll also see Neo4Js spin on graph databases, allowing rapid traversal of relationships.

You wont have to use all of these databases to be a better programmer or database admin. As Eric Redmond and Jim Wilson take you on this magical tour, every step will make you smarter and lend the kind of insight that is invaluable in a modern software professional. You will know where each platform shines and where it is the most limited. You will see where your industry is moving and learn the forces driving it there.

Enjoy the ride.

A book with the size and scope of this one cannot be done by two mere authors alone. It requires the effort of many very smart people with superhuman eyes spotting as many mistakes as possible and providing valuable insights into the details of these technologies.