Dan McCreary - Making Sense of NoSQL: A guide for managers and the rest of us

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To technology innovators and early adopters... those who shake up the status quo

We dedicate this book to people who understand the limitations of our current way of solving technology problems. They understand that by removing limitations, we can solve problems faster and at a lower cost and, at the same time, become more agile. Without these people, the NoSQL movement wouldnt have gained the critical mass it needed to get off the ground.

Innovators and early adopters are the people within organizations who shake up the status quo by testing and evaluating new architectures. They initiate pilot projects and share their successes and failures with their peers. They use early versions of software and help shake out the bugs. They build new versions of NoSQL distributions from source and explore areas where new NoSQL solutions can be applied. Theyre the people who give solution architects more options for solving business problems. We hope this book will help you to make the right choices.

Where does one start to explain a topic thats defined by what it isnt, rather than what it is? Believe me, as someone whos been trying to educate people in this field for the past three years, its a frustrating dilemma, and one shared by lots of technical experts, consultants, and vendors. Even though few think the name NoSQL is optimal, almost everyone seems to agree that it defines a category of products and technologies better than any other term. My best advice is to let go of whatever hang-ups you might have about the semantics, and just choose to learn about something new. And trust me please...the stuff youre about to learn is worth your time.

Some brief personal context up front: as a publisher in the world of information management, I had heard the term NoSQL, but had little idea of its significance until three years ago, when I ran into Dan McCreary in the corridor of a conference in Toronto. He told me a bit about his current project and was obviously excited about the people and technologies he was working with. He convinced me in no time that this NoSQL thing was going to be huge, and that someone in my position should learn as much as I could about it. It was excellent advice, and weve had a wonderful partnership since then, running a conference together, doing webinars, and writing white papers. Dan was spot on...this NoSQL stuff is exciting, and the people in the community are quite brilliant.

Like most people who work in arcane fields, I often find myself trying to explain complex things in simple terms for the benefit of those who dont share the same passion or context that I have. And even when you understand the value of the perfect elevator pitch, or desperately want to explain what you do to your mother, the right explanation can be elusive. Sometimes its even more difficult to explain new things to people who have more knowledge, rather than less. Specifically in terms of NoSQL, thats the huge community of relational DBMS devotees whove existed happily and efficiently for the past 30 years, needing nothing but one toolkit.

Thats where Making Sense of NoSQL comes in. If youre in an enterprise computing role and trying to understand the value of NoSQL, then youre going to appreciate this book, because it speaks directly to you. Sure, you startup guys will get something out of it, but for enterprise IT folks, the barriers are pretty dauntingnot the least of which will be the many years of technical bias accumulated against you from the people in your immediate vicinity, wondering why the heck youd want to put your data into anything but a nice, orderly table.

The authors understand this, and have focused a lot of their analysis on the technical and architectural trade-offs that youll be facing. I also love that theyve undertaken so much effort to offer case studies throughout the book. Stories are key to persuasion, and these examples drawn from real applications provide a storyline to the subject that will be invaluable as you try to introduce these new technologies into your organization.

Dan McCreary and Ann Kelly have provided the first comprehensive explanation of what NoSQL technologies are, and why you might want to use them in a corporate context. While this is not meant to be a technical book, I can tell you that behind the scenes theyve been diligent about consulting with the product architects and developers to ensure that the nuances and features of different products are represented accurately.

Making Sense of NoSQL is a handbook of easily digestible, practical advice for technical managers, architects, and developers. Its a guide for anyone who needs to understand the full range of their data management options in the increasingly complex and demanding world of big, fast data. The title of , and based on your selection of this book, I can confirm that youve made one already.

T ONY S HAW

F OUNDER AND CEO

DATAVERSITY

Sometimes were presented with facts that force us to reassess what we think we know. After spending most of our working life performing data modeling tasks with a focus on storing data in rows, we learned that the modeling process might not be necessary. While this information didnt mean our current knowledge was invalid, it forced us to take a hard look at how we solved business technology problems. Armed with new knowledge, techniques, and problem-solving styles, we broadened the repertoire of our solution space.

In 2006, while working on a project that involved the exchange of real estate transactions, we spent many months designing XML schemas and forms to store the complex hierarchies of data. On the advice of a friend (Kurt Cagle), we found that storing the data into a native XML database saved our project months of object modeling, relational database design, and object-relational mapping. The result was a radically simple architecture that could be maintained by nonprogammers.