A recent series of posts by C Mohan offers a lot of food for thought. And Mohan knows a thing or two about databases. As I said in an earlier tweet,
“tracking @seemohan ‘s database accomplishments is a #bigdata problem.”
Many of the things that we see in the current NoSQL products are really a continuation of a trend that one can trace back to the dawn of relational databases (RDBMS’) themselves.
A long time ago (thirty or forty years ago), there were CICS/ISAM (mainframe) applications that had a very close understanding of the physical record layout. The benefits of generalization and abstraction proposed by CODASYL and later the relational model allowed applications to focus on querying the data in some simple language and not concern themselves with the physical layout and representation of data in files. The benefits of abstraction provided by a simple ubiquitous programming (query) language allowed for an explosion of applications and the popularity of the initial databases. [...]